


give your heart to a wild thing

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Affection, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Asexuality, F/M, Gen, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mycroft grows up too fast, Self destructive behaviors, Sibling Love, Suicidal Thoughts, Unrequited crushes on certain detective inspectors, internalized hatred made external, self hatred
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-20
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-27 03:03:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 31,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/973547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft is just hoping he doesn't have to kill Sherlock's daemon in her sleep to help Sherlock live to see adulthood. It might as well be his prime directive, because nobody else seems capable of doing it. </p><p>
  <i>A His Dark Materials fusion that follows the Holmes brothers from childhood.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mycroft

Mycroft had been six and a half when his brother was born, and he’d waited with his father, watching him as he paced the parlor.

His father's daemon, Gwen, paced behind him in perfect eighth notes with her hooved feet. When the midwife emerged from the room, he’d looked up expectantly, but instead of announcing the good news to the both of them, she’d leaned in to his father like she had a secret. The color seemed to bleed out of his father’s face, and Gwen made a startled sound. 

“What’s wrong, father?” he asked, when she’d disappeared again.

 “Nothing, Mycroft,” he’d said, voice low. “Your brother’s daemon is just a little ahead of schedule.” He hadn’t cut the cigars yet, so his brother didn’t exist yet. QED.

“Okay,” Mycroft said, unconvinced, and his father went back to pacing. Papagena, shaped like a possum, sat on his shoulder and fidgeted with her little paws for another two hours. His father had paced a mile before Mycroft fell asleep in his father’s armchair, Papagena perched in his hair.

In the morning, his father woke him up to show him while his mummy was still sleeping. The baby’s daemon was shaped like a kitten, and had laid tangent with him in his little crib, soft as melted butter. Mycroft had reached out to touch him – his brother, not his brother’s daemon – but she had batted at his hand anyway. He’d laughed, charmed with both of them already, and his father had ruffled his hair.

“What do you think, Mycroft?” he’d asked him, eyes shining with exhilaration behind the evidence of a long, sleepless night.

“I think he’s…” he spluttered, flushing. His father didn’t usually approve of shows of sweeping emotion, and Mycroft had felt like his heart might explode in his chest. Papagena, Mycroft’s daemon, leapt from his shoulder towards Sherlock’s crib. Mycroft’s stomach went into free-fall until she shifted into a hummingbird before she reached him and he was unspeakably relieved that she hadn't squashed him with fat paws.

“Amazing,” she’d breathed, hovering so close to his dark, fine hair that it fluttered under her.

Mycroft felt fleetingly nervous, but his father let out a booming laugh. “That’s what I thought, too.”

*

Enola learned to walk with Sherlock, a warm shadow behind him that favored the four legged mammals from the start. Her speech came slower. Sherlock babbled at her and she’d just look at him, until he was three and starting to argue to get what he wanted. His ability to get his demands met at such a formative age was quite impressive, and when Enola started chiming in, skipping the syllable building blocks in favor of full words, their success rate became frankly scary.

When the two of them weren’t united by the common goal of getting what they wanted, Enola seemed to be rather withdrawn. Enola spent most of her time sitting out of Sherlock’s reach. Sherlock privately had the sort of relationship with Papagena that he should have had with Enola.

“Sherlock,” his mother said once, in a stunned voice, “unhand Papagena this instant!” And Sherlock had, pulling his hands back from her long silky ears as if he’d been burned, eyes like globes.

“There are things I didn’t think I had to explain to you, Sherlock,” she said, voice fresh from the icebox.  

He stuttered an apology, and their mother’s daemon moved to Papagena, looking her over as if she’d been hurt, and Mycroft had to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Evven at ten years old, he had found her melodrama tedious.

His mother softened as she pulled Sherlock into her arms. “Doesn’t it feel terrible when someone accidentally bumps into Enola?”

Sherlock hesitated a moment before nodding, but Mycroft could tell he was only agreeing because that seemed to be what their mother wanted. She seemed placated though, and stroked his hair with shaking fingertips. Enola sat, petulant and distanced, beneath Papa’s armchair by the fire.

Later, alone, Mycroft explained to Sherlock what he hadn’t seemed to have an innate grasp on. He hadn’t realized at that point that there was some lack in Sherlock: a hollow space where most people’s instincts lived, but now he supposed it made sense. “When you touch someone else’s daemon,” he said, trying somehow to explain a feeling that everyone else just _knew,_ and for a second, he thought he had it: Mycroft almost described the feeling he got when Sherlock his a dissonant chord while practicing, magnified by a power, but then he remembered that little Sherlock was immune to those, too. It was why they made him practice in the old nursery, half-soundproofed as it was.

Eventually, Mycroft said, “It’s very jarring. It hurts somewhere you can’t touch.”

“I, I didn’t mean to—”

“Not with me, Sherlock; it doesn’t hurt when you touch Papagena, except, maybe don’t do it in front of mummy. But definitely not a stranger. You must never touch anyone’s daemon, Sherlock. Not if you’re not invited.”

Sherlock frowned. “Why would I want to touch anyone else’s daemon?”

So there was the miniscule relief of that. He worried constantly about nearly everything: his brother and the economy and the news and the fact that he was suddenly aware that year that his father was made out of geometry angles and hard edges, but he seemed to take after his mother, who was made of organic contours and pastries. But he didn’t have to worry that little wild-child Sherlock would pick up a strangers primate daemon because he found them so utterly fascinating.

Small miracles.

*

At eleven, Papagena and Mycroft were getting ready to go away to public school. Papagena hadn’t officially settled, but she spent so much time as a platypus that Mycroft was warming to the idea that it might be permanent. His father, of course, wasn’t particularly pleased, and reminded him with embarrassing regularity that it wasn’t the Holmes way to let people know how singular you were from a hundred paces.

Mycroft fount himself caught in the duality of agreeing with his father and being secretly pleased with Papagena for edging towards a form his father thought made him look “singular.”

She’d caught on first, actually, that there was something fundamentally wrong with Enola. “Mycroft,” she said, in her low, sweet voice. “We shouldn’t leave Sherlock.”

Mycroft didn’t _want_ to leave Sherlock, but he did want to leave the day-school behind, as his father often reminded him, he was nearly too old for all of his childishness. He pretended he couldn’t hear her and kept his eyes trained on _A Brief History of Time._ “Mycroft!” She barked, landing her bill against his bare chest like an open handed smack. “Your brother’s daemon _does not like him._ ”

“You’re being dramatic, Papagena,” he said, eyes scanning the same line over and over again, but he couldn’t seem to parse the meaning. “Everyone bickers. Even mummy and father.”

“They don’t _bicker,_ ” she said, and suddenly the weight on his bed changed and he rolled towards her. It had probably been her intention, he realized: she’d shifted into a deer very similar to his father’s daemon. “She rarely even talks to him. There is something very, very broken there.” He wanted to deny it, but some part of him was convinced it was true, and that part of him spent most of its time with Sherlock. 

Their father died that year, postponing his boarding indefinitely, and Mummy seemed to expect him to know what to do with Sherlock when he became a howling thing. And he was, often, a howling thing. Sherlock would descend into shrieking insanity, and all Mycroft could do was wait it out. He would sit on the kitchen floor with Sherlock, or on his bed, or in the garden with Sherlock and he rolled and cried and had his meltdown over whatever it was that has sent Sherlock into a tailspin.

“Sherlock, Sherlock,” Papagena crooned, climbing right on top of him on her goofy flippers. “Darling boy, what’s wrong?”

Sherlock would hold her tightly while Mycroft sat a few feet off, watching intently. Watching Sherlock treat Papagena like a grubby ted he could drag around by the ears which his own daemon perched atop his wardrobe with ramrod posture gave Mycroft a nebulous, humid feeling in his chest.

Mycroft, by then, was old enough to have observed by then that nothing about them was completely normal. He’d never met anyone who’s daemon kept so much distance between themselves and their human, for one; at least, not that wasn’t necessitated by their size or circumstance. For another, Sherlock touching his daemon didn’t bother him like he thought it should.

In private, and away from Mummy, Sherlock essentially treated Papagena like his own. And Mycroft didn’t _mind._ Papagena liked being scratched between the ears when she had ears and her flippers being rubbed when she had flippers; Mycroft found that when Sherlock saw to those things, Mycroft felt the same sense of warmth that he might feel if he’d leaned down to tap on her himself. It didn’t hurt that Sherlock looked so happy with her that it always made Mycroft realize how lonely he must be during the day, with only their grieving mother for company.

“Sherlock,” Papagena said once, when they were all four in their father’s study. “be a love and fetch me your fathers globe.”

Sherlock, who was only five at the time, smiled sweetly at her. “If you would settle on something with an opposable thumb, Pap, you wouldn’t need me to fetch for you.”

“Ah,” she said, “That is true, Sherlock, but then who would I teach to read latitude and longitude to after I’d pulled the globe down all by myself?”

Sherlock, delighted, leapt for his father’s desk, which they’d left untouched like a shrine. He had practically climb on the desk. Mycroft watched them over the top of the newspaper for a few moments before he was assured that Papagena was hovering below him in case he lost his footing. Enola, from the corner of the room, let out a huff. The sound made his blood run cold. Papagena’s voice in his head, “ _there is something very, very broken…_ ”

And Papagena’s voice in the study, “First Sherlock, find me London...”

*

When Sherlock Holmes, age six, mastered writing, the mystery was gone.

After the basic format of writing words in order became tedious, (a new word Mycroft heard often that year) Sherlock started organizing everything he ever wrote alphabetically by first letter of each word in a sentence and then shredding the individual words until they were ordered sequentially. He kept notes on everything he experienced in a little notebook that said _ABEINOORSSTV_ on the front, like his whole life was a case study.

Mycroft watched him write, in the early days of this trend, when he was curious about it. Sherlock, curls askew like a wild thing, hunched over his notebook at the table, wrote so fluidly that for a moment, Mycroft was convinced that he’d already become bored of his newest habit and had gone back to writing words in the vowel-skeleton shapes the OED had them down under.

When he crept in for a closer look, he was wrong. “Can I see this?” he asked in low voice, and Sherlock handed him the whole book, almost luminous with his excitement.

“This is very clever, Sherlock,” Mycroft told him, his eyes glued to the page for a long moment. “You misspelled something in here, though.”

“There’s no way you can tell that fast,” Sherlock says, half amused and half petulant. Impish, Mycroft realized. The word could have been invented for him. His face shifted into a look Mycroft recognizes as _prove it,_ which is the only way Mycroft can convince Sherlock to believe anything.

Mycroft pointed it out to him and made him get out the OED to verify while Enola snickered.

A month later, mummy comes across his _AVEUBIIRSSTV_ notebook, and flipped through it casually. “What am I looking at, Sherlock?” she asked, puzzled.

He smiled up at her, face like a Botticelli angel, and lied through his teeth: “Just pretending, Mummy.”

Enola flew up to the table as soon as Mummy put it down, and shredded it with her frankly ferocious claws in a matter of a few seconds. Sherlock looked small and terrified for a moment, and looked to Mycroft in his moment of panic, eyes filling with tears. Papagena, a badger at the time, grabbed Enola by the neck with her pointed teeth and shook her around.

“Mycroft!” Mummy screeched, and Roland lept onto the table as well to thump Pap on the back of the head with his great paw.

Papagena spat her out, then, but she didn’t look at Mummy or apologize to Roland like he’d expected her to. Instead, she barred her teeth at Enola until she quivered, and then demanded: “ _Apologize_.”

She repeated it woodenly, a word divorced from its meaning. “Apologize,” she said, looking at Sherlock with a cool gaze. Mycroft had to be sent to his room without supper, but his anger curbed his appetite anyway.

*

Mycroft, nearly thirteen years old, somehow had become his mother’s co-parent.

There is always something. Sherlock’s room was connected to a place in the foyer that acted as a convenient intercom for mummy to unload her disappointments about Sherlock without acknowledging him or having to look at the obvious disconnect of his soul. She always seems unsettled by Enola’s posture and position in relation to Sherlock: spiny, feathered, or furred back to him, eyes on the other humans in the room instead of other daemons. Sherlock at seven years old spends slightly less time throwing full on tantrums as the grief bleeds away, but he’s still a tropical storm.

Some days he barely gets in the door before his mother is steering him to the part of the house that makes his stomach clench in preemptive anxiety. Papagena usually slinks off to comfort and distract Sherlock from what they both know is coming. “I had to go down to the school again today,” she’d sigh.

“Ah,” he’d say, inquiring but not zealous, always _always_ aware of the little boy who was probably huddled under his vent, head tilted up as if taking his penance.

“Fighting, _again,_ ” she’d sigh. Roland curled around her shoulders, an ocelot painted in tense lines. Roland always seemed to be tense since father passed. His tail twitched in short, annoyed flicks. “He’s seven years old, Mycroft, what am I supposed to do?”

 _Well,_ Mycroft thinks, _you could talk to him instead of sighing into his bedroom through the woodwork._

Mycroft is only twelve, so instead he says, “I’ll talk to him, mother.”

Papagena is not amused, when he gets to Sherlock’s room.

He knows Papagena is not amused because she has shifted into something Mycroft doesn’t recognize: like an artichoke with claws. Claws which she currently has pressed against Enola’s windpipe. Enola, beneath her, is squirming her little rabbit body in all directions to escape the hold.

“ _Pap!_ ” Mycroft screeches, voice cracking humiliatingly, and she turns to look at him, steel in her eyes. “What are you doing!”

Sherlock is face down in his pillow, not even looking. The tips of his ears are red on either side of his messy curls, and the pit of him has to feel the bruise of Papagena’s brutal hold.

“ _This little shit,_ ” she hisses, which is strange, because Mycroft has never sworn before. Mycroft physically lifts her off of Enola before things go too far and sets her back on the floor. She immediately scampers onto Sherlock’s bed, nuzzling between his neck and the mattress. She practically disappears, and Mycroft doesn’t know what’s happened, but he trusts himself. He glares at Enola. “Explain.”

She resolutely doesn’t look at him.  

 Mycroft doesn’t touch Enola as often as Sherlock touches Papagena, but he picks her up now, swiftly, with firm hands, and does something extraordinarily undignified: he stuffs her in the hamper, and closes the latch.

“Sherlock, sit up please.”

After a few moments, Mycroft thought he might have to repeat himself, but eventually his little brother pushed himself off the bed with one elbow, the other arm still firmly wrapped around Pap. His face was flushed, and Mycroft could read some of his day in the details of his scuffed shoes, damp neck, scraped cheek and rumpled blazer. “Why would you pick a fight with an older boy? And,” another glance down to the hem of his trousers, his coat tails, fingertips, inkstained and spindly, “so close to the end of the day?”

“ _I_ didn’t,” he snuffled, glaring accusingly at the hamper. Before, Enola had obviously been systematically scratching and shredding all four walls of her wicker prison, but now she went suspiciously silent.

“Enola picked a fight with someone else’s daemon?”

“No!” Sherlock huffed, jumping to his feet so emphatically that his hair bounced around his head for a few moments like a wild thing. _Sherlock_ looked like a wild thing. “She keeps talking to _other people,_ Mycroft, it’s…” Sherlock spluttered off, but Mycroft could hear it all the same. Holmes men, they didn’t admit to being humiliated; they waited it out and plotted and they cut the other person off at the legs when they were given the opportunity.

“… do the other kids… talk back?” Mycroft knew that good manners kept people from interacting with other people’s daemons as a general rule, and vice versa, but _good manners_ were not always fully developed in six year olds.

“Yes!” Sherlock’s little fists were clenched so tightly that he was shaking. “They like her! They like her because they _gang up on me!_ ”

Mycroft didn’t know what to do with that one. And then it crystalized into clarity: Sherlock, who was small for his age, and brilliant and sad, and desperate to make friends but didn’t know how, had a daemon who was all of those things but _did._ And she did so by _bypassing Sherlock,_ and making him the common enemy with _other humans._ Mycroft’s whole brain was spluttering.

“Sherlock, you cannot tell Mummy. She’ll send you away.”

Sherlock, small and miserable, composed himself enough to look at Mycroft like he was a complete idiot, which was heartening, at least. “Of course not. What could Mummy do about it?”

Summer was almost there, and Mycroft’s heart thudded in his chest like a wild thing, sped on by secrets and adrenaline, and he told Sherlock, “I am going to figure this out.”

And Sherlock said, “Okay, Mycroft.”

Papagena didn’t change again after that. Mycroft identified her in short order as a pangolin, and he wished his father was around to answer his questions: what did that mean about him? Would he still have found it singular?

Sherlock, for his part, thought she was wonderful and demanded that Mycroft take him into town to the library to find the proper reading material.

*

Summer came shortly after, and for a little while, everything was golden. He took Sherlock out to the park and Enola chased after ducks, shifting midair into something more suitable for swimming than her hare form. Papagena followed closely on Sherlock’s heels, and strangers didn’t know the difference.

He taught Sherlock to watch, and which details were throwaway or anomalies and which ones would yield relevant information. “Those two girls are of some relation,” Mycroft would quiz him, “what do you think?”

Sherlock was a quick study. As summer drew to a close, his guesses became both more plentiful and more creative. The day he responded to a ("it's too cold for American shorts. Tell me about her.") question with a diagnosis: _hyperthyroid syndrome, could make her feel hot all the time, and look how far her hipbones jut!_ Mycroft felt a warm surge of mingled pride and affection.

He was teaching Sherlock to put together _all_ of the clues, though, and dismiss the irrelevant, so he couldn’t congratulate him just yet. He affected a scoff. “Skinny is very chic right now, Sherlock.”

To which Sherlock gave her a second look and pronounced: “The outfit, in its entirety is very unattractive in extremely obvious ways. If it was about fashion, she could find shoes that don’t clash with her top.”

The theory was not what Mycroft personally suspected about the young woman in question, but Sherlock was seven years old. It was all very promising.

*

It was difficult to come to terms with the fact that Enola was _part of Sherlock’s soul_ because Mycroft loved Sherlock, and with Enola, he sort of … didn’t. It didn’t seem normal that half of his soul would be so unimpressed with the rest of it.

At thirteen, Mummy told him how very sorry she was that she’d let her grief steer his education plan off course.

“Come September,” she informed him, smiling, “you’ll be at Eton, like your father.”

Mycroft was excited for himself, but anxious for the little boy that waited on the steps for him to get home from school. Who came home from his own primary school with the joy of felons being released from solitary confinement.

 He knew the rules of the game he played called “dutiful son/ doting mother” encouraged him to say thank you and move on with his day, but he couldn’t seem to make his tongue work. Finally, he pushed a question out of his mouth, tongue suddenly leaden and dry like a dead slug: “What about Sherlock?”

“Oh darling,” she said, pulling him close. Within arm’s reach, she seemed delicate, like a pressed flower. “It’s sweet that you worry about your brother, but he’ll be fine.”

He’d never heard her say anything like that before, and he studied her face intently. On close inspection, she seemed to believe it. “How do you know?”

“Because I’m your mother,” she smiled, carding her fingers through his hair, “and you’re a child. It’s not your job to worry, Mycroft.”

Of course, it _was_ Mycroft’s job to worry. She’d been asking him to worry for years now. He swallowed the lump in his throat, and in September, he left for Eton. Sherlock wrote him letters, sometimes in alphabetical order, but he grew out of that infatuation quickly enough. Mycroft wrote back in codes, and could read more in the time it took his brother to get back to him than in what he actually said to him. He was miserable, he wasn't making friends, he missed his brother terribly. He said little of that, instead keeping to lists he'd made a types of bees, times he heard mother swear at him, what he thought about other people's settled daemon's forms. 

At his first break, he came home excited to see his brother and to teach him the rules of yarder cricket, which he was pants at, but his seven year old brother wouldn’t have known that.

*

At Christmas, Sherlock seemed sullen and unshowered and Mycroft couldn't get him to engage in any of the interesting things he wanted to tell him about, and instead had to content himself with sitting in the nursery with a Sherlock who held his bow like he was posturing for a fight, tense little eyebrows looking so far out of place on his sweet little face. Near the end, Sherlock hit a cluster of notes that set his teeth on edge until Enola snarled:  _enough already_ and Sherlock said, "Are you sorry yet, Mycroft?" 

Mycroft said, "Of course I am," and Sherlock seemed to collapse under the weight of his own relief, his bow hitting the ground with an artificial sound, but he set his violin down gently. Mycroft looked at Enola accusingly. "You could have let me know you wanted an apology."

" _I_ didn't," she said, condescendingly, but crept closer to him all the same. " _I_ happen to know you were at  _school,_ not having adventures."

He reached down to scratch Enola between the ears for the first time in months and she purred under his fingertips as Sherlock glared at her sullenly from his spot on the floor. "Besides," she muttered, self satisfied, "you can't possibly have done anything exciting; you got fat."

Sherlock laughed so hard he started choking on his own spit, and Mycroft picked up Papagena and went to his room, feeling betrayed and angry. 

* 

On boxing day, he gave Sherlock a complicated snake-bite puzzle box, and his mother arranged for him to have a tour of an apiary south of London and Sherlock and Enola seemed to have reached some sort of truce forged of their mutual excitement on the subject of bees. 

At the apiary, she eventually got them kicked out by shifting into a bee-form and trying to see the colony from the inside, but Mycroft noticed that she'd waited until the tour was almost over. On the way home, ignoring the scolding they were recieving from their mother, Sherlock and Enola shared conspiritorial whispers. When he had to go back to school, Mycroft apologized again. "It's just school, Sherlock. It's one of those important things. You'll go off, too, when you're older."

"I know," Sherlock had huffed. "And I'm sorry Enola was rude to you." 

"Well, to be fair," Mycroft allowed, "I have sort of gotten fat." Both of their daemons were underfoot, and fleetingly, out of context, they looked so ordinary: Papagena playfully nipping at Enola's toes, Enola trying to climb aboard Papagena's back. They looking like siblings, not Holmeses. He left him feeling less worried about Sherlock than he could remember. 

*

The last day of term, his mother was unavoidably detained dealing with Sherlock, so she sent a driver to pick him up.

On the way home, Pap sat on the seat next to him, strapped in with her little harness she thought was undignified, and didn’t even complain about it like she did during car rides that didn’t culminate in seeing Sherlock.

When the driver dropped him off, Mycroft thanked him and let himself in. He could immediately hear Sherlock, somewhere in the house, doing his best impression of a train whistle, piercing the usual oppressive silence of the Holmes house. Mycroft was running before he has time to consult with his reasoning brain, or the memory of his father who valued subtlety and discretion above all else, or even Papagena because she was bounding forward on all of her paws, too, in time to burst into the old nursery where Sherlock was clawing at his own curls from the floor, face red and blotchy, and his mother looked frankly, somewhere south of furious. She doesn’t even look at them when the door opens, as focused as she in on Sherlock when she screamed, “ _IT WORKED FOR YOUR FATHER._ ” And Sherlock howled at the same time, “ _I’M NOT GOING BACK, I WON’T, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME._ ”

Then Mummy’s eyes fell on Mycroft and her expression shuttered. “Oh, hello dear,” she said demurely, and Sherlock scrambled to his feet, lurching off-balance as he launched himself at his brother. “Mycroft,” he howled, his face pressing into Mycroft’s soft stomach, “you can’t leave again.”

Papagena clawed at Sherlock’s trouser leg, needing to look him over for damage, but he didn’t budge. “Mycroft,” he sobbed again, and Mycroft realized with a stifled gag that there was already a substantial amount of snot on his school blazer.

“Your brother is being dramatic,” she sighed. “Sherlock, go to your room, so your brother and I can talk.”

“I _am not!_ ” Sherlock’s voice was small and heartbroken, and Mycroft wanted an answer _now._

“Sherlock started therapy last week, for his problems.”

“Thomas Edison only did it to criminals,” he mumbled, “and he said no, at first, until it worked with his—” Sherlock hiccupped, softly, three times. “—smear campaign.”  

A lead ball dropped in Mycroft’s stomach: he’d taught Sherlock about that. “You’re letting them electrocute Sherlock?” he whispered, hands clutching his brother tightly against him as if he were suddenly worried that Sherlock might scurry off.

“Not you too,” she sighed. “It’s a _medical procedure._ ” And then she added, cutting her eyes between Sherlock and Enola, who was currently a large bird of prey sitting on the windowsill, not involved in the scene at all: “it gives them a common enemy.”

That caught her attention. Enola’s eyes flashed nastily. “I think I have enough of those, don’t you?”

Mycroft didn’t generally agree with Sherlock’s daemon, but felt fleetingly proud of her. Sherlock was seven years old, but Enola sounded fierce, undaunted. He'd spent his whole life coaching Sherlock into seeming ordinary: into not letting anyone see the glimpses into his broken brain, into his strange relationship with his daemon, which was something like an amputated limb, if limbs were prone to hate you after they were no longer attatched. Now, he felt so angry that it didn't matter. She could see how truly wrong Sherlock's daemon was.

He sent his mother a frosted glare, picked Sherlock up – he was an awkward bundle in Mycroft’s arms – and turned on his heel as gracefully as he was able. “Come along, Enola,” he said, heading for his room. He knew if she tried to fight with him, Papagena would pick her up by the back of the neck, but for once she had the sense to follow him, leaving their mother gaping. 


	2. Sherlock

Sherlock was five when his father died. That morning, he had gone out onto the grounds to see how far he could get from Enola before it started to get painful. From what he observed, most people liked to be within ten feet or so before they started to manifest self-soothing behaviors. They’d never formally experimented on Mycroft and Pap, however, repeated observation had shown that they seemed to be fine stretching out across the manor – it had been her habit to seek him out ahead of Mycroft since his toddler years, it seemed – but got anxious after a few hours and would come scoop her up.

Sherlock, however, rarely had the urge to move closer to his daemon. He’d wanted to know how far that extended, but his father had come out to find him around eleven in the morning. “It’s hot enough to kill a man, today, Sprout,” he’d said, and scooped him up. “Today’s not a good one for adventure. Let’s practice instead.”

So the last day of his father’s life, he’d sat in the soundproof nursery, leaning against Gwen, with her graceful sloping neck and sad-doe eyes.

While Sherlock sawed away at his violin, his father watched him intently. An hour crept by, and then another. Finally, Sherlock set down his violin, wrist and fingers throbbing, and face warm with shame, he felt defeated, stopping before his father had asked him to, especially when he had his full attention.

His father glanced at the clock with a start. “I’m sorry, son. I didn’t notice the time. You should go find your brother.”

Sherlock, dismissed, went to leave. His father left that night at eight PM, and he didn’t come back. Sherlock was convinced for some time that there was some great mystery involved, and he prodded at this thought like a tongue against a loose tooth in his spare moments.

“Leave it, Sherlock,” Mycroft told him, on occasion when he mentioned it to him. “It was an accident, a proper accident.”

He looked to Papagena, then, settled as she was by then into long grey lines. Such a strange thing: Sherlock thought she was marvelous.

She, unlike his own daemon, seemed to have some sense of loyalty to Mycroft. “Leave it, Sherlock.”

*

The year Mycroft went off to Eton, Sherlock realized how much he relied on him. It hadn’t occurred to him before: they were brothers, and Mycroft was important to him, but when he left, he suddenly felt off-balance, like he had to get used to being ambulatory with a changed quantity of limbs.

Without Papagena and Mycroft to act as a buffer between he and Enola, he and mummy, Sherlock’s world grew so quiet. At school, there was the constant pull of Sherlock’s-brain and the tedium of other people, and his daemon who hated him, and other children who seemed to hate him for one reason or another and Enola was so desperate to be liked by them – so desperate she made him sick – with her hopeful little face tiled at the boys that already thought he was a freak, so quick to adopt the same line of taunts in hope they’d like _her_. None of it made sense, but his head was quieter with Papagena in the room to tell him that he was interesting, with a mind like an underwater cave, or his brother, giving him new material to line it, like a magpie’s nest.

After school, his mother sighed at him and he tried not to sigh back. She and Enola made small talk, sometimes, but mainly they didn’t.

She’d been gossiping with a friend she played bridge with on the weekends, once, right under his mailbox, chattering along, _my poor eldest, he’s quite the man of the house, worries himself sick about little Sherlock._

He thought about Mycroft for a long time, looking through their childhood as if flicking through a photo album, but he tried to look at it with the most impartial lens. Mycroft, his face worried when Enola refused to come down from the top of the bookshelf where she’d flown, Mycroft, scolding Papagena for giving Enola a thrashing, but only after she’d been thoroughly shaken, Pagagena, leaving Mycroft’s room to come sleep with him and Mycroft’s tired face in the mornings.

In the morning he refused to speak to his mother with more intent than usual, and must have fallen short of complete subtlety, because she asked him what on earth he could possibly be pouting about as she poured his cereal.

Sherlock chewed for a long minute, thinking about how Mycroft would answer the question, before an answer presented itself naturally. “I think I miss Mycroft,” he said thoughtfully.

Mummy seemed stunned briefly, before smiling. That seemed to be a secret password into a pleasant enough morning, and she drew her fingers across his forehead, brushing all of his curls out of his face. “He’ll be home soon, darling. Let’s write him a letter.”

Sherlock did not need any help writing letters, but he let his mummy pretend anyway.

*

Mycroft came home from his first break excited to teach Sherlock about a modified miniature version of cricket, and Sherlock didn’t tell him that he clearly wasn’t suited for the sport because he had so much fun explaining it.

December of that same year, Mycroft came home for the Christmas holiday with subtly different proportions that Sherlock remembered. It hadn’t been long enough for Mycroft to change drastically.

Sherlock’s arms don’t reach around the same way, but he doesn’t figure that out until Mycroft leaves again, because he spent much of his visit sulking loudly and dramatically at him. The whole time Mycroft was home, Sherlock’s brain kept skipping forward to the fact that Mycroft was going to leave again.

On Christmas eve, their mother retired early with a headache and Sherlock played clusters of notes that he hoped would make Mycroft feel the way Sherlock did: like snapped strings and broken pencils and flat tires: useless and thrown out. His is home alone in a house that might as well be a mausoleum.

“ _Enough already_!” Enola spat, finally, and Sherlock found that he was accidentally crying, and he said, “Are you sorry yet?” which he hadn’t meant to say, but as soon as he had, it became a question that he needed to hear an answer to.

Mycroft said he was. Sherlock was suddenly high on the feelings of elation, he could read in his brother’s face that he’d missed him, and it chipped away enough of the lead in his stomach that he’d felt lightheaded.

He made Mycroft angry right after that, and didn’t apologize until boxing day, but he just kept thinking about how Mycroft had gone off – and he could say he wasn’t having adventures, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t having fun – and left him behind, but in the face of all of that, he’d missed him.

*

Sherlock and Enola and the rest of their little family went to see the bees in London on boxing day and he wrote out every detail in his notebook. Sherlock thought he should probably quit while he was ahead because he was never going to have a more interesting day.

They took Mycroft back to school, and he made sure to crouch down next to Sherlock and mention, again: “It's just school, Sherlock. It's one of those important things. You'll go off, too, when you're older.”

“I know. I’m sorry Enola was rude to you.”

Mycroft smiled at him, and then Enola, conspiratorially. “Well, to be fair, I have sort of gotten fat.”

*

After the Christmas holiday, Mummy took Sherlock and Enola for an appointment with the doctor. After a few good months, all things considered, his sense of relentless paranoia was out of practice.

Sherlock didn’t even think to be suspicious until the doctor stopped asking routine check-up questions and started asking when he’d first noticed something was different about his daemon. Clues popped up all over the office too late for Sherlock to have had the advantage he might have had being armed with that knowledge: the books on the shelf, including the DSM – the binding at the top of the book curling out where he probably thumbed it down – the journals on the table, his tie and the soft hands with skin that hadn’t been dried from over washing – Sherlock felt stupid, unforgivably stupid.

He refused to speak, and the doctor turned to Enola, her hackles raised. “I just want to ask a few questions,” he said, in a low voice, pitched to placate his mummy, who was still watching with an expression he couldn’t read.

“No thank you,” she said, curtly.

Except, it was coming now: Sherlock could feel the prickle on his skin like an oncoming storm. He was going to be sent away, and even Mycroft couldn’t save him.

Daemons couldn’t even _lie_ so there was no comfort for Sherlock. Even if, in the last few minutes, Enola had decided that she and Sherlock would make a more effective team, she wasn’t capable of pretending, like Sherlock was.

He had never hated her more, and as she was asked question after question, Sherlock began to cry. Enola, to be fair, was miserable. She had slid effortlessly into something more intimidating, some sort of vulture, and he could feel the desolation coming off of her in waves. They wouldn’t be able to tell, and Sherlock was fiercely glad, in spite of himself. For some reason, them knowing that Enola hated him (and there was no doubt; she used the word freak and unlikable and missing something, which was true) was almost bearable – far better than knowing that in that moment, they had won so easily, ripped truth from her long, hideous beak despite her desire to keep it from them.

When the tears had first started to fall, his mother had started to move towards him, but the doctor had shaken his head no.

By the end, Sherlock was sobbing, his mother restraining herself. Enola was standing between himself and the doctor, and Sherlock thought she looked magnificent, fearsome and cruel and he wanted her to settle that way. They were going to do something horrible to him. It was obvious enough, in the way his mother looked sad, but resigned, and the doctor had a hint of pity in his voice as he asked questions like, what about your brother? and how do you feel about your mummy? The pity didn’t seem to change his course of action, though, so it did Sherlock no good.

Enola answered sharply, every question. The moment the doctor went to reach for Sherlock, she dove for his hand, missing and tearing his coat sleeve in a way that would have drawn blood a few inches down his wrist, he began to look triumphant. “I think we have something to work with, Mrs. Holmes.”

His mother nodded tearfully, leaving the room as an orderly came in to subdue Enola.

*

Sherlock didn’t tell Mycroft what had happened to him: not the first time, or the second. He was furious in a way that made him feel helpless, and humiliated, and hurt. He doesn’t know how to explain all of that to Mycroft, especially not while Mycroft is at school, worried sick about him, but completely unable to do anything about it presently.

There is a long month where once a week, his mother had to get a screaming, thrashing Sherlock into the car while Roland tried to get Enola to cooperate. “I hate you,” he told her, but also, “I love you mummy, mummy, mummy please don’t, please, I’ll do anything,” and he’d say anything to keep them from getting into the car. The whole thing is humiliating and they strap both of them down and the first time he wet himself. The memory made him feel hot and sick.

In his head he had a countdown, Mycroft’s end of term looming ahead of him like the promise of redemption. Mycroft doesn’t disappoint. Mycroft comes home and doesn’t even let mummy speak. He simply picks Sherlock up, not quite big enough to stand between Sherlock and the rest of the world just yet, but big enough to try.

*

If there is much discussion between Mycroft and mummy about the events, Sherlock was not privy to them. Sherlock is a child, and Mycroft seems to be her peer. Something happened when father died, some promotion into the secret world of grown-ups before his time.

Instead, Sherlock sees only the end result: Sherlock is to be sent to the public school Mycroft was going to attend before Eton, when father had been alive. At the end of summer. Sherlock is terrified and exhilarated and even Enola seems a little pleased.

Papagena and Mycroft apologized profusely. They barely let him out of their sight all summer, and he flourished under the constant attention; the long year with his brother so far away faded away. Papagena stopped checking him for damage constantly midway through summer.

Once, they found a dead fox on the grounds and Mycroft helped him dissect it. When he lamented that he couldn’t keep the details in his mind like a picture, Mycroft taught him a trick of imagining a place to store it in his mind, and then imagining himself putting it there.

Sherlock felt skeptical, but he went along with it just in case. He imagined the wardrobe in his room, but he pictured it empty. On a newly clean shelf, he placed the dead fox, taking great care to imagine the matted texture of its fur, the puncture wounds on its neck that were most certainly the cause of death, and its little grimy paws.

*

The first time he shoved Enola into a small space, he was eight and she was in the shape of a mouse, trying to talk to a boy in his class. Ryan had good manners and what Mycroft called breeding, so of course he was demurely pretending he couldn’t hear Sherlock’s wild animal of a daemon trying to talk to him.

Sherlock’s face was a muted shade of mauve, and finally he simply plucked her from his desk and shoved her into his satchel, and he grimly hoped it hurt her enough to make her behave. He’d be overjoyed if it would last an hour.

At his new school, Enola was always talking to strangers. It had gotten him sent to the headmaster’s office so many times, he had lost count, and he wasn’t really hoping to get kicked out of school. His mother might not forgive him, or worse, Mycroft might be disappointed.

Enola, though, was not one for going quietly. She screamed and thrashed and used every blasphemous swear she knew from his bag. Sherlock felt a strange sense of déjà vu as he trudged to the headmaster’s on leaden feet.

“I’m sorry,” he’d croaked the first time, with his dry throat and burning eyes, and wondered if there was a natural gas leak before he’d realize that he was crying.

After that, he kept his mouth shut about the whole thing, preferring to wait out the lecture than to explain that Enola wasn’t likely to take direction, from him or anyone else. Mycroft had told him that wasn’t normal, in the voice he had that suggested to Sherlock that normal wasn’t exactly something to be strived for, but rather, something that had to show other people so that they didn’t get diagnosed or ASBOs or locked up somewhere that even Mycroft wouldn’t be able to save her from.

“We wouldn’t have to be lonely,” she’d hiss, when they were finally home. She liked cat forms, he assumed, in part to the ease of the sibilant sounds pouring out of the feline mouth. “If you could just stop being a freak and make friends.”

Sherlock glared back at her. “We wouldn’t be such a freak if you wouldn’t try to talk to other people. Why don’t you ever make friends with daemons?”

Enola scoffed at him. “Tedious.”

“What, other daemons?”

“Yes, other daemons. They’re all shells filled with Styrofoam.”

This didn’t sound accurate to Sherlock. He obviously wasn’t allowed to talk to daemons that didn’t belong to his brother, but he spent enough time surreptitiously watching them to know that they couldn’t lie, not with words and once they’d settled, the form was always an interesting data point.

“Papagena’s not a shell,” he argued.

“Mycroft isn’t uninteresting. There is enough Mycroft to fill a shell with census data and puzzle pieces. He doesn’t have to use stuffing.”

Sherlock was pretty sure that’s not how the physiology of a daemon worked, but as always when Enola was on a roll, he just let her his. Down by his feet, she was shredding his homework with her claws. He was going to have to redo it.

“I hate you,” he muttered, pulling out his textbook again and settling down at his desk.

“I hate you,” Enola echoed, sounding cheerful as she pushed around the shredded bits of his coursework with her pink nose.

“Dear Mycroft,” he muttered, wielding his pen as if he was writing a letter. “Enola is unbearable – please send Pap.”

“Oooh,” Enola sighed. “Yes, please!”

*

Eventually, sometime between when he was eight years old at a new school and when he was thirteen and old enough for Eton, he and Enola reached some semblance of peace based on the mutual understanding that they aren’t to speak to each other. Enola calmed down enough to stop talking to other humans, after he physically gags her and carries her around in a bag for four days without letting her out.

When Sherlock was eleven, Mycroft came to pick him up himself for his Michaelmas long leave in his own car, Papagena curled in the back seat, and Sherlock was stupidly pleased with the reminder that the world is starting to see Mycroft the way that Sherlock began to see him long before that. Mycroft is an adult, and Sherlock grinned at him.

“Where to?”

“I had thought…” Mycroft said, and he sounded tentative. And then, finished, after a beat, “deduce it.”

Sherlock studied him intently: losing weight again, he thought, angrily. Papagena hated dieting. It made her feel listless and angry. Sherlock looked a little deeper: beneath the nervous surface, a tie that looked nothing like anything Mycroft would actually wear, pedantic bold colors, a suit with an off-the-rack cut.

Enola, in the back seat, wagged her tail like she was a real puppy, and not a dragon in disguise.

“You’re pretending to be blue collar,” Sherlock started, eying Enola suspiciously. Sherlock found it highly suspect that she would have come to such a pleasing conclusion so fast, so it was more than likely a mind game. Sherlock soldiered on: “You’ve cut your hair shorter than you keep it…” He couldn’t work out who his brother was trying to impress. Who do you dress down to impress? Mycroft wasn’t even wearing cufflinks.

“Sherlock!” Enola barked, “Are you dead? Can’t you smell the chlorine?”

Sherlock’s heart gave an excited kick. “No,” he said, voice low, reverent. He probably looked like a stupid schoolboy in his blazer and floppy curls and asymmetrical smile.

His brother, on his right, looked like the cat who’d swallowed the canary, and moved on to the Alaskan Salmon. “I’d like you to meet someone you might find interesting.”


	3. Mycroft

“I’m going to need you to be nice to Enola, Pap,” Mycroft told his daemon, eying her in his rear-view. “For the entire leave.”

Papagena paced around testily on his back seats. Among her least favorite things in the world were hunger, Enola being unkind to Sherlock, and her car harness. Mycroft had elected to excuse her from the third because he was dieting, and because Sherlock and Enola were coming home for a full week.

“I am going to need a fairy cake,” she said, which was the most no-nonsense way he’d ever heard the phrase spoken.

“No,” he said. “No no no. We are not negotiating with food. That’s hardly healthy.”

“Like anything our relationship with food is healthy _._ I want my _fairy cake._ ”

“It is your objective to keep Enola calm for the duration of the break,” Mycroft said, choosing his words carefully. “I will conduct a performance review, and based on –”

“I will scream until the neighbors call in an emergency,” she said, blinking her serious little eyes at him.

“We will revisit this topic later.”

He heard Papagena suck in a long, deep breath through her strawlike mouth, and if Mycroft hadn’t realized what was happening he might have crashed the car when she began doing her best impression of a boiled kettle. It didn’t relent as he expected it to, after a few seconds. After she used her first lungful of air, he heard the long shaky in hale of an impending round two.

“ _Alright_!” he snapped, and round two evaporated instead into a ragged exhale. She looked smug, for an artichoke.  

Mycroft didn’t speak to her for the rest of the drive, beyond trying to still her when he could hear her claws sliding against his mother’s leather seats in long, take-no-prisoner scritches.

When he finally made it to Sherlock’s school, he had to wait for him to notice. In the interim, he tracked Sherlock’s mouth as he fought with his daemon, Enola slinking around his ankles like a sullen thing. When they noticed him, they both lit up.

Mycroft felt as fond as he ever had when Sherlock went to his door, tie askew, eleven years old and wrists too long for his blazer. Growing so fast, Mycroft mused, as he assessed his brother for the first time in weeks: hair ruffled from absent fidgeting, Enola’s posture petulant but not murderous, excitement about the break. Sherlock, in turn, looked up and down Mycroft in a look that was so familiar to him because he’d _taught_ Sherlock to drink in the details.

“Where to?” Sherlock said, grinning, as Enola started to settle into the back with Papagena, nuzzling her with a canine muzzle.

“I had thought…” he paused. Papagena had wanted to break the news, but Mycroft was still annoyed with her for sabotaging his waistline, so instead he said, “Deduce it,” like a challenge.

Sherlock was immediately interested at an answer that wasn’t “ _home_ ” or “ _to get you fitted for a new blazer_ ” as he might have expected. His eyes tracked an outline of him like a pencil on tracing paper, far more carefully than his initial assessment.

“You’re pretending to be blue collar,” he listed, frowning. “You’ve cut your hair shorter than you keep it.”

Mycroft grimaced. To be honest, that one had been an actual accident, but Sherlock needed the occasional red-herring to keep him sharp. It would do him no good to hand every deduction to his brother. Mycroft had hopes of Sherlock outshining him in that particular field one day.

Enola, with her canine nose, must have known immediately. “Sherlock!” she barked, after giving him a moment to puzzle it out, “are you dead? Can’t you smell the chlorine?”

“No,” Sherlock breathed, and Mycroft grinned at him.

“I’d like you to meet someone you might find interesting.”

*

He’d warned him, before he’d gone to collect Sherlock, because it was only fair. “My brother,” he’d said, feeling itchy in a shirt he’d spent less on than several of his biros. “He’s a bit…” He had never had to explain Sherlock, not really, so he’d been at a bit of a loss. He usually let Sherlock do his force-of-nature routine with strangers, and got to live through him a bit vicariously. Mycroft was too self-disciplined to shock strangers, but he was always secretly pleased that Sherlock could care less if he left little old ladies in Harrods with dangling mouths. This time though, he didn’t want to risk it. “He’s not good with people. He’s very intelligent, but he doesn’t have a lot of … tact.

That had seemed to be the best way to sum up Sherlock without the use of invective. Gregory Lestrade, the detective constable he’d been tailing for his EPQ, was a man ten years his senior, and when Mycroft had met him in person after two weeks of correspondence with his Detective Superintendant, he had felt overdressed in a way that made him feel vaguely embarrassed, which he certainly wasn’t used to. Lestrade had calluses and a little patch of grey hair at his temples, and when he laughed at Mycroft, Papagena bristled near his feet.

“I have one of those,” he’d said, smiling. “Little Christopher is only five, and the only person I know with worse manners is his awful mum.”

Mycroft had to take a moment to sort that sentence into his mental picture of Detective Constable Lestrade: something about his cuffs during one of their early meetings had warned Mycrosft that he was _sentimental_ about a younger child, but his service record and punctuality had read as unattached.

“You grew up in a council house,” Sherlock mused, when he met him. “But you’re moving up quite quickly. And you must have some interesting hidden depths, if your supervisor thought you’d be a good fit for Mycroft to follow during his extended project qualification.”

Mycroft struggled to get his heart rate under control before he turned red.

Sherlock and Lestrade looked at each other for a few minutes, before Sherlock dropped his eyes to Enola, who was gnawing on his ankle in disapproval. “Sorry,” he muttered, and Mycroft was secretly shocked. Sherlock must have been so excited to get to the real events of the day.

“S’alright,” he said, reaching out his hand. “It’s more or less true, although you missed the bit where I was homeless for a while, ta.”

Sherlock’s total lack of shock at the declaration told Mycroft that Sherlock had indeed noticed, but had thought better of mentioning. It probably said something about the Holmes family values that he was inexplicably proud of Sherlock.

Sherlock took his hand, and Mycroft did formal introductions. “Detective, this is my brother, Sherlock. Sherlock, Detective Lestrade.”

The fact that he hadn’t already gawped at Sherlock was a good sign, although he had by that point, been in Mycroft’s acquaintance for three weeks, during which Mycroft had slowly revealed some of the Holmes knack for stringing data points into constellations of truth, although he’d never detailed the steps very clearly. He’d pinpointed only details that would be unmistakable to the non-Holmes but still fairly observant eye. From the moment he’d seen the DC, and his dead-leaf moth daemon (and ran through the internal litany of _fond of a young child, probably a niece or nephew, prematurely grey, stress or genetic? council housing, uncomfortable in the presence of Mycroft, no, Mycroft’s outfit, homeless at least once, camouflage daemon, unassuming, had to remake himself with only his own power…_ ) Mycroft had found himself hopelessly smitten with the older man.

He didn’t find himself wanting to act on it, after the painful lurch of surprise that he was not only facing attraction, but attraction towards a man. The whole thing had been unsettling, and then the dust had settled, and Mycroft had thought: _huh. I don’t know how I missed that,_ because he was a phenom with the unknown but give him too many details and he was prone to missing the solution right in front of his face. He had faced palpitations before in the face of interesting stimulus: a girl in lower-sixth with him had made a joke about Euclid and he’d felt his chest grow tight and warm. Looking at the Detective made him feel the same. Acting on it would be ultimately unsatisfactory, Mycroft was sure.

Which was probably a good conclusion to reach, with Mycroft’s political ambitions ahead of him.

Mycroft sent prayers up occasionally, to whatever force could his lizard brain relied on to steer the universe when he had a fit of panic that he would regret when his adrenaline faded. He sent one now. Sherlock was eleven, and though his voice had rasped at intervals for the past few months, he hadn’t fully moved into puberty yet. Mycroft was hoping for a hole in his knowledge for a while yet.

“Your brother thinks you think that there’s something wrong with the Carl Powers situation,” Lestrade started.

Sherlock seemed to come alive. “There _is_ something wrong with the Carl Powers – wait, you’re not referring to it a case.”

“So far there’s been nothing to indicate it was one. Young boy got a leg cramp. It seems like a tragedy.”

“Has anybody asked his parents if  they have his shoes? Or do you think he got on the bus in his bare feet?”

*

Sherlock, when properly engaged, was a sight to behold. Mycroft had known that from very early on. With Lestrade giving him weighted looks, and utterly failing to do the things he expected adults to do at every turn (cut him off, brush off his hard-to-follow thoughts, or reprimanding him for his lack of manners) Sherlock had stopped looking so crazy-eyed, and started using his inside voice, although he was no less obviously excited. Even Enola phased into a sparrow to hover by Lestrade’s daemon, and they exchanged a few mid-flight pleasantries.

By the end of their discussion, Lestrade had invited Sherlock to come look at the scene with him.

“Did Mycroft tell you about Carl Powers?” he asked at one point, making small talk with Sherlock while he sat in the back with both of their daemons.

As another point in the DC’s favour, he didn’t seem to bat an eye at either of them when it became  clear that Pap preferred Sherlock’s company if he was available.

“He might have,” Sherlock allowed, looking at Mycroft, and then back at Lestrade, “but I read about it in the paper and wrote him about it before he had a chance.”

“And you immediately thought it must have been foul play? Reading that the boys shoes were missing?”

“No,” Sherlock seemed to puzzle this over. “Enola did. Sometimes she knows things first. But it did seem suspicious.”

“On the force, we call that a hunch.”

Sherlock pulled a face. “How very pe—culiar.” He said, faltering, and Mycroft heard the shift in his voice, and would have bet his favorite cufflinks on the fact that Sherlock had started to say ‘pedestrian’ before he realized that this man was taking him to something he alone considered an actual crime scene.

Lestrade let out a deep, rumbling laugh. “Your brother doesn’t believe in hunches either.”

“My brother is an extremely intelligent man,” Sherlock said, stroking Papagena’s long, scaly ears. And then, in a voice Mycroft had never heard Sherlock use, he said: “He has numerous good qualities, actually.”

Lestrade smiled again, and Sherlock looked charmed that someone was paying attention to him. “You bet he does. He showed up a month ago at the station in a bespoke suit as I was filling out the paperwork for a three day stakeout which, I’m sure you don’t know this, but three days of coffee and nicotine patches feels very much like a hangover, and convinced me to let him do a follow along for his dissertation, and only after he’s talked me into it the long way do I find out that he’s already got my super to sign me out on lend.”

That wasn’t exactly the way Mycroft remembered it, but he was thrilled and embarrassed in equal parts that his little brother was hearing it, and amused that his apparent desire to make a good impression in front of his brother had led him to _chatter_.

“Mycroft,” Sherlock said, sounding very serious, “is very persuasive.”

“That,” Lestrade said, “and also, you take one look at his daemon, and you think: this man is indestructible.”  

Mycroft made a choking noise and went red from his neck to the tips of his ears, and Lestrade seemed to remember that there was third party in the car, and they’d been talking about him for the past few minutes. “Sorry, Mate,” he’d winked, and past his head, to Mycroft’s right, he could see the buildings he’d been to just hours before, when he’d been exploring before.

“Well,” Lestrade said. “Looks like we’re—”

Sherlock didn’t even let him finish before he was out of the car. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have any fandom friends to lend me a pair of eyes. :(


	4. Sherlock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because of FIC THINGS, I've taken some liberties with timelines (I've moved Carl Powers to 1991 instead of 1989 to put Mycroft into upper sixth...) and anachronisms (the EPQ that Mycroft is doing woudn't have existed as such, because that was introduced in 2009) but mostly because I freaking love Lestrade, and I clearly cannot be held responsible for my actions...

Sherlock didn’t have to slow down to know that Papagena was on his heels. “Sherlock!” she called, sounding half outraged at his running off, but mostly delighted.

The front door of the public pool was locked, but DC Lestrade was behind him, looking relaxed and amused, with a key in his hand.

“Your brother thought you’d be really interested in this drowning, Sherlock.”

He was; he’d read about it in the paper: they’d described the little locker cubby he’d had with his folded shirt and trousers and interviewed his parents but not friends and Sherlock had thought: _something is missing,_ and Enola had said, “Did they mention his shoes?” with a superior look, because she liked to pretend he had to be led by the nose.

“I am,” Sherlock confirmed, letting Lestrade and Mycroft lead him to the locker room. He seemed content enough to let them explore.

Lestrade, as a teenager, was probably a chav. That’s how he reads, now, anyways, but Mycroft was wearing things he wouldn’t be caught dead in under normal circumstances, so he obviously wanted the constable to think well of him. Mycroft kept looking at him: his subtle viper-in-the-grass brother was being obvious as a roadblock. Sherlock would have been embarrassed for him if he hadn’t been so busy buzzing with excitement.

“A school swim meet, who could have taken his shoes unnoticed? And what kind of evidence could they be?” Sherlock muttered to himself as he paced the length of the locker room.

“Perhaps,” Lestrade said, but Mycroft held up a hand.

“Let him get there.”

*

Sherlock wanted to meet Carl Powers’ mother; Lestrade thought that would be inappropriate. Sherlock wanted to see the CCTV footage from across the street to see someone leave with Carl Powers’ shoes; Lestrade thought that would be difficult to get a hold of before he could confirm that there was actual foul play.  
  
“What good is he, then?” Sherlock demanded of Mycroft.

“He’s let you investigate, Sherlock,” he answered with a deep scowl, pulling him aside by his elbow. His brother was definitely going to have premature wrinkles, and that cheered him up a little. Mycroft moved a few meters away from Lestrade with a squirming Sherlock in tow: not far enough to be out of earshot, but far enough that he could look off into the distance and politely pretend that he was. “A random public pool after hours, because I told him my eleven year old brother would be chuffed to see it. Now can you be well mannered, or will you and Enola be spending your entire leave with Mummy?”

Sherlock stopped squirming and glared at Mycroft. After a long, withering moment where Mycroft met his gaze calmly, Sherlock dropped his gaze. “I’m sorry, Constable.”

Mycroft gave his elbow a pat and smiled at him.

Lestrade didn’t respond to Sherlock’s miserable apology, which was quite good of him, in Sherlock’s opinions. Instead, he said, “I can get you his medical history and autopsy report, if you like.”

*

Sherlock spent his leave taking over their father’s study. He stayed up late into the night reading about paralytic toxins and making lists, ordered by ease of detectability in the bloodstream, and cross-checking it against lists of diseases that might have gone undetected, or come on suddenly.

Sherlock set up a cork board with the help of his brother, and put up his notes, some detailed, some a single word or phrase on a page: _eczema, size 11 feet._

Mycroft sat vigil with him, aware of him on some level, surely, because he occasionally answered Sherlock’s mutterings, but mostly he seemed to be engrossed in his own project.

“ _A child_ ,” he whispered, over and over. “ _A child with a backpack, shoes so long, he’d have had to tuck them away or wear them out, getting rid of his own, or thrown them away, would someone have thrown them away, need to go through the skip before it gets picked up, a child, a child._ ”

When his vision began to blur with sleep and hours of close-range focus, Papagena read aloud to him and he listened, his forehead rested against his father’s desk. Enola, for her part, gnawed ruthlessly on his ankle until he finally shot back up.

“The only interesting thing that’s happened to us all year and you’re going to _sleep_ though it,” she sneered.

“Sorry,” he muttered, pressing on his eyes with the heels of his palms hard enough to see solar systems.

“Sherlock, it’s almost three AM. Perhaps a rest wouldn’t be amiss.”

“I can’t,” Sherlock groaned, picking at his already wrecked cuticles. Papagena put her shapely nose in his hand instead and he began fidgeting with her ears obligingly.

“Well,” Mycroft allowed, “I am going to take Enola to bed. You and Pap can stay up another hour.” He gave Papagena a significant look, and Sherlock knew that she would be enforcing his bedtime.

“Traitor,” he muttered to her, but in a clear voice, he said, “Thank you, My.”

Mycroft’s lip twitched upwards. “Been a while since I’ve heard that one.”

“I will not be sent off to bed,” Enola said, with half of the venom she would have used if it had been Sherlock’s idea.

Mycroft looked briefly conflicted, before he picked her up and tucked her under his arms. “You and I can look at it in the morning with fresh eyes.”

Her body was rigid with fury, but she didn’t dare fight with Mycroft, but she did shift into a larger mammal in a fit of passive aggression. Mycroft steadfastly ignored her, and continued to carry her as a wild hog, even though to Sherlock’s eye, she appeared to be at least sixty kilos, adolescent as she was. Mycroft trudged along, breath coming hapidly until he reached the end of the hallway.

“Good night, Mycroft,” he whispered into the silence.

*

“The further you go back in history,” Papagena said, nosing at the fresh scrape marks at Sherlock’s ankle with no small amount of concern, “the less mentions you find of daemons. Evolutionarily speaking, it makes the most sense that they would have arisen from a need to protect oneself from danger during sleep.”

“That’s hardly relevant right now,” he said, trying to stay focused on  his father’s old volume on epilepsy, but the words had already started to run together, and a single sentence was becoming an uphill battle. He was interested despite himself.

“The custom of sleeping when your human does, and vice versa, is cultural, and relatively new. The best we figure is that it came about when people started being intensely private and paranoid about not know what their daemons might get up to while they slept. Communal living wouldn't have lent itself  to that kind of thinking.”

Mycroft and Papagena were taking one of their A-Levels in daemonology, which had surprised Sherlock. Most of Mycroft’s other pursuits were related to his enormous, less than secret political ambitions; law, economics, maths, classics, G&P, not to mention the subjects he was teaching himself, and subsequently Sherlock, like physics. (Mycroft claimed he was writing Sherlock long letters on the subject as a studying method, but Sherlock suspected he was often lonely at school.)

“What does that have to do with anything, Pap?”

“Things are different now, Sherlock. People and their daemons haven’t always been considered so closely related. The split hours of consciousness meant that they rarely interacted. They whole dynamic was quite dichotomous.”

Sherlock looked at her sharply, scanning her little face. “Are you trying to make me feel better about the lack, or call my daemon an evolutionary throwback?”

“I’m trying to do neither, Sherlock,” she said, wrapping her tail around his arm affectionately. “Mycroft and I don’t usually know what to think of her. When I read that, though, I thought you might find it interesting. We have the book in Mycroft’s bag.”

Now was not the time to find things interesting that weren’t related to his current puzzle. He looked back the the medical file in his hands. “His mother, his mother… something.”

“It’s time for you to get into bed,” Papagena said, as his chin hit his chest.

*

Papagena laid across the bottom of his bed until he fell asleep, and he woke to her draped over his chest, her scaly stomach warm against his chest.

Sherlock felt strangely content when he opened his eyes, reaching up to scratch idly behind her ears before the knowledge that _this was not a part of his life_ engulfed him.

Mycroft and Papagena had to go off in the morning to ride-along with Lestrade, and Sherlock felt an acute sense of jealousy being left at home with Mummy, but Mycroft left with the list he wanted Mycroft to give to the coroner, so he could hardly sulk.

They did tea, and she asked him about school. “If Mycroft were older, I wouldn’t even need to go to school,” he said, not thinking. “He’s the only on that knows anything worth knowing.”

Enola chewed on the previous day’s wounds, which she did sometimes when she felt he was out of line, but his mother didn’t get angry. “Your brother asked for you when he was five years old. Did you know that?”

Sherlock shook his head no.

“Well, he did. He was five years old and your father had him in his lap, reading the newspaper together like they did every morning at the breakfast table, dreadful habit that it was, and Mycroft looked over the paper at me and said, “Mummy, Father and I have decided that you should make another child.”

She paused and closed her eyes. It was the most serene he’d seen his Mummy look in some time, sitting in the filtered sunlight of the breakfast nook, Roland resting across the window sill in an inexplicable feline balancing cat. Finally, she continued. “I looked at your father and he laughed, and said, _that’s not exactly how the conversation went,_ but he thought Mycroft hung the moon: every day was a new excitement.”

That wasn't the father Sherlock remembered. “If Mycroft was five already, then…” Sherlock started, without an end in mind. 

His mother leaned over to ruffle his hair. “We got lucky. We’d waited so long because your father was terrified that Mycroft would turn out like him.”

Sherlock felt lost. “What was so bad about that?”

“Sherlock,” she said, and she’d retreated back into the sadness that always seemed to have her. “We waited so long to have another child because he was so terrified of having a child with a daemon that hated him. When Mycroft and Papagena turned out healthy, we thought it would be okay to try again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pileated Gibbon: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lifeonwhite/4472561195/


	5. Mycroft

When Mycroft handed it off, Lestrade took a long look up and down Sherlock’s list and his eyebrows jumped towards his hairline. “This is… quite a list.”

“I can access my trust for education related expenses,” Mycroft said, avoiding his eyes. Kalia, Lestrade’s bark-colored moth daemon made a chittering noise and he held up a hand to silence her.

“I don’t think that should be your responsibility, but honestly kid, this is a lot of tests to run on a body that’s already been ruled an accident.”

Mycroft swallowed down the lump in his throat. Just when he was about to lose his nerve, Pap pressed down on his foot with her little claw. “Let me foot the bill,” he said, sounding more confident than he felt. “A positive test should be enough to expense it to the Met, don’t you think? If not, we’ll not speak of it again.”

“This is all on the hunch of an eleven year old.” Lestrade didn’t sound disdainful, but considering.

“He’s not just any eleven year old.”

“If you’re sure,” Lestrade said, and Mycroft grinned.

“I am never anything but.”

*

At home, Sherlock noticed his scuffed shoe and came to inaccurate conclusions. “Blimey, Mycroft,” he scowled, “will you stop being so stupid and eat something? Unlike you, Papagena requires regular feedings.”

Papagena, the traitor, went to butt at Sherlock’s legs like a common cat.

“Sherlock,” their mother chided, “give Mycroft a moment to put his coat away before you begin deducing his day, please. And Mycroft, duck, there’s some cobbler in the warming oven.”

Pap practically vibrated with excitement. “No thank you,” he said, shooting her a firm look, “we had quite a lunch.”

He excused himself to his room, and his daemon did not follow. He knew Sherlock would take great delight in feeding her, with his wiry adolescent body. Even now it was obvious to Sherlock that he would grow effortlessly into the impressive figure their father had cut, while Mycroft would calculate each meal with his geometric brain and still come up short.

*

They found traces of Clostridium botulinim in Carl Powers’ blood.

Sherlock was mentioned in two local papers as an anonymous tip instrumental in recognizing the Carl Powers Tragedy as the Carl Power Murders. _The Times_ called him _a schoolboy with determination as big as his hair_ which Mycroft thought was dreadfully imprecise, like an enthusiastic Yank had phoned it in. Sherlock, though, was delighted.

“I solved a real case,” he told Mycroft, to sum up his holiday.

“That you did,” Mycroft said, fondly.

“They thought I was determined,” he said.

“You are,” Mycroft said.

“This was the best holiday ever,” Sherlock sighed, sinking into the leather seats.

Mycroft made eye contact with Papagena in the back seat, and they shared a smile. Even Enola seemed to seemed to consider the holiday a success, and sat in her harness without much complaint. Papagena looked pleased, and Mycroft tried to put it out of his mind that he still owed her a fairy cake, even though Sherlock had spent all week blatantly spoiling their diet in ways he fancied surreptitious.

The things he thought he could get away with in regards to Papagena were rather telling about his blind spots. That he would even entertain the idea that he could give Papagena something she desperately wanted and Mycroft would not feel that reflective joy told him that Sherlock himself wouldn’t expect to. It was one of the reasons he worried about Sherlock, constantly.

The closer they got to school, the more tense Sherlock became, shoulders coming around his chin like a collar as he receded into the sullen boy he’d become somewhere along the way.

“It’s only school,” Mycroft chided. “You’re too clever to dread school.”

“No one knows anything,” he muttered, looking at Mycroft’s dash.

That one was a familiar feeling to Mycroft. He wasn’t teaching himself four extra subjects for nothing.

“And the headmaster keeps threatening to kick me out if I can’t stop fighting.”

“If you can keep out of trouble until the end of term, we’ll do something marvelous.”

“Like what?” Sherlock wanted to know.

“I haven’t figured it out yet,” Mycroft admitted, “but I did just let you solve a crime.”

Sherlock brightened in his seat. “I _did_ just solve a crime.”

*

“I finished my dissertation,” he said, by way of hello, near the end of the year. “For my EPQ.”

Lestrade nodded at the chair in front of his desk. “Good to hear,” he said, and before he sat down himself, Mycroft could read his reunion with the mother of his child in the creases in his trousers.

“I thought you might like a copy,” he said, soldiering on.

“You never even told me what your whole paper was about.”

“Sorry,” Mycroft said, looking down at Papagena, who nosed at Kalia under the desk. “It wasn’t a secret, I just didn’t know how it was going to come together.”

Lestrade grinned cheekily at him. His whole face lit up, and Mycroft felt an acute longing like pinpricks on his internal organs. “You don’t say? Weird to think your calculator brain has the ground view.”

“I’m only human, Constable,” he said, smiling back at him.

Lestrade touched the stack of papers in front of him. “I’ll be embarrassed if I don’t understand this.”

“I think this is probably goodbye,” Mycroft said.

Lestrade nodded gruffly. “Give them hell, Mycroft.”

“That doesn’t sound like my MO,” he said.

“Doesn’t it?” Lestrade asked, looking down at Papagena. “I think you’re going to get exactly what you want. Where you want to be. And you’re not going to do that by going down easy.” He opened one of his bottom drawers and set a tall bottle in front of him. “Have a drink with me.”

Mycroft nodded numbly, and let Lestrade pour. It was the last time he’d see him for some time.

*

Mycroft left for Oxford to read law at the end of the year. His father had been there, and his mother gave him his old trunk. Later, when Sherlock went off to Eton, he would only be an hour’s drive on the M40.

At the beginning of his first term, he had in his possession a trunk filled with miscellaneous worldly goods, eight A-Levels and one academic paper that had been about the types of daemons most commonly associated with law enforcement but turned into a manifesto on one man.

His first year passed with singular focus, his brain split into a few main goals. He spends most of his time maintaining his spectacular marks and networking (to be fair, he’s never going to be the sort of man who gets invited on _lad’s holidays_ and no one is ever going to call him a _bloke,_ but it’s different now: he’s still the smartest man in the room, but it seems to sting less when the margin isn’t quite so wide.) and almost all of his time hungry. Papagena is nearly always cranky, but by the end of the first term, he had carved the figure he’d been chasing since puberty out of the softness.

*

During an organic chemistry lesson, Papagena scuttled out from under his legs (sprawled at a calculated angle somewhere between the obtuse _men claiming too much space on the train_ and acute decorum) to perch under a shapely woman he recognized by her sweetly-rounded face, but doesn’t know the name of.

He spent the entire ninety minute lecture mentally reeling her in, pleading with her in his head. He’s not above bargaining, but Pap resolutely refuses to meet his (discreet) glances, and when the lesson is over, as he’s deciding what to do, she strides over to him, planting herself in front of him with a cheeky grin.

“Hallo,” she said, and Mycroft’s gaze flickered down to the most telling parts of her out of habit, hands, jewelry, hair, mouth…

“Terribly sorry for the intrusion,” he said, instead of what Sherlock might have said, like, _did you move to England to have your hand surgery or was that a coincidence?_ “I don’t know what’s gotten into her. Usually we have a healthy sense of boundaries.”

“Oh, no, it’s not your daemons fault. I’m sorry, Euclid is probably more to blame… he actually, well, this is embarrassing. Are you headed anywhere next?”

“I am not.”

“Can I get you a coffee and an explanation?”

*

Her name is Priya. Euclid, the Sun Conure has one hobby, and it seems to be petty theft, and swearing, as she says _like a parrot._

“I’ve been meaning to give these back to you,” she says, when they finally sit down with their drinks, producing two of his nicer fountain pens from her satchel. “I don’t actually know why no one notices him; he’s hardly camouflaged. He just crawls around under desks, nicking things out of innocent bystander's bags.” The offending bird preens under the attention of the table and she flicks him playfully on the side of the head. “Not a compliment, you criminal.”

Mycroft assured her that there was no harm done, and he went to nudge the table’s sugar shaker towards her, she shook her head, and Euclid flapped his wings until her hair was wind tangled. “Okay, you bully!” she laughed, and gave a tiny shake above her beverage. Papagena gave him a look that promised murder if he didn’t follow suit.

“My father thinks he’s hideously embarrassing, on the whole.”

She and Mycroft shared a conspiratorial grin. “I know what that’s like.”

Their meeting is practically over before it began, and soon she is excusing herself, gorgeous and brown in her golden blouse. “It was really lovely to meet you, Mycroft,” she said, holding out a hand for him to clasp. He does, and tries not to watch her as she leaves the dining hall.

He thinks briefly, that he would still like to know about the hand surgery. Maybe next time. Papagena blinks her beady little eyes at him and without saying anything, he tips far too much sugar into his coffee and pushes it at her.

It doesn’t lead anywhere, but it is useful to him, in a way _. Nosce te ipsum_ , his father was fond of saying, and he comes out of the encounter with a new data point: he experiences sexual urges as infrequent isolated incidents, hardly enough to make a pattern, but up until now, they had primarily been focused towards the male form: his dissertation tutor, a classical musician his mother has a painting of, _Gregory Lestrade._

“You almost sounded like a bloke there,” Papagena laughs at him, always in the mood for jokes after unnecessary sugar. “Who knew?”

*

He is so fueled by his own internal clockwork finally feeling _right,_ that his focus on family, always a source of high anxiety, almost falls away. He is eighteen and tall and his access to information is unparalleled. He keeps up with family affairs to the extent that no news is good news, and he’s nearly certain he’d be alerted immediately if Sherlock was kicked out of school. He’d be on the train immediately, to go sort things out whilst Mummy retired to the fainting couch. Christmas draws near, though, and there’s been no word of that.

At Christmas, he leaves Oxford a few days after the break begins, and arrives home in time to witness a brother with a settled daemon, a mother at her wits end and a small house fire. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SPOIL YOURSELF FOR ENOLA'S FORM AND VICTOR TREVOR'S FACE? 
> 
> http://katiewont.tumblr.com/post/63345756818/give-your-heart-to-a-wild-thing-a-his-dark
> 
> (a photoset of young and old Mycroft, Sherlock, VIctor, and all three's daemons)


	6. Sherlock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Serious trigger this chapter for self hatred, self destructive behaviors, suicidal ideation, and serious angst. Seriously, this chapter is very sad, but I think we're only a chapter or two away from the Sherlock & Victor show, so... Um, if you want to skip this chapter, nobody would blame you.

Sherlock’s last year before he started Eton was a blur of social misconduct, fighting, anarchy, and general delinquency. Sherlock could do lines faster than anyone he knew, Enola sitting at his heel dig her claws into his ankles all the while. Mycroft had started Oxford that year, and Sherlock rarely, if ever heard from him.

Enola settled in October, and didn’t realize what had happened until she went to leap to take flight and landed into a graceless thud. Sherlock looked over, and at once realized what had happened. He scanned her up and down for an instant before he began to laugh.

“Shut up,” she screeched, “or I’ll poke your eyes out.”

“You’re stuck,” he said, his laughter starting up in full force now. “You don’t even have opposable thumbs.”

She thrashed around, “like _thumbs_ are the most important thing.”

His first thought was to write to his brother, who he’d always assumed would be the first to know, and who would point out the things he’d missed, but now that it had happened, he consciously swallowed that down.

The moment of levity was gone. “You were quite content to be an Echidna for the last half hour, Enola,” he said.

“For the specific purpose of—” she cut off abruptly and Sherlock scanned the area around her. He typically let her get on with whatever sort of destruction she pleased when she wasn’t being particularly vicious with his person, just to keep her out of his hair. He let out  long, ragged sigh when he realized how much havoc she had brought upon his sock collection, each one riddled with holes or shredded to bits. 

“I hate you,” Sherlock said, sotto voce.

“Well, I’ve settled all wrong. I don't have any damn teeth, so perhaps we can be miserable together.”  

Sherlock did not want to do anything _together_ with Enola; he wanted five bloody minutes to himself to think for once. A thought came to him, swiftly and fully formed like a letter in the post: he could kill her.

He was immediately terrified that the thought would even cross his mind. He pushed it away, and when it came back swinging, he closed his eyes, imagined the historical old house he pictured to store memories, and locked it in the basement. When he opened his eyes, Enola was taunting, and he found he was breathing hard, too fast.

“Too much for the little boy?” she sneered, her voice like a grown woman’s, and his legs felt weak beneath him. His knees hit the floor, jarring him, and she continued in a low, gravelly flow as his thoughts spun out, faster and faster: his brain was a bullet-train on ten tracks – he did not have to lose one to follow another and he couldn’t escape from the strange, wrong confines of his life.

He wasn’t thirteen yet and he knew every moment of every day that he would never, ever be normal, and here his soul was, with her vicious, bloodthirsty eyes and every inch of her weaponized: proof that no part of him was cozy, no part of him was touchable.

At some point, he must have hyperventilated because he woke up curled on his side with shredded hands and Enola on his bed, once more refusing to speak to him. Which, he supposed was the better of two options.

*

On the twenty third of December, Enola started a chemical fire and Sherlock honestly did not know if it was an accident. He felt pathetic, sneezing soot and wheezing as his mother cried for hours.

The whole thing was so unfair. Shouldn’t he be the one to cry? Hadn’t he deserved some of the misery she had hoarded for herself since their father had died? When she was upset, Roland was there, _we’re okay, we’re okay, you’re going to be fine,_ and letting her cry into his gorgeous silky fur. He knew the exact curve of Enola’s spine in a hundred different forms but sometimes had to think about what her front paws looked like, or her neck, because of the angle she favored, away, always away.

Sherlock, considering it his due, after a period of bleak shock when his mother paced the floor crying _I just don’t know what to do with you,_ and Roland keeping pace, pushing his muzzle into her hand, trying to lead her away until she finally relented.  _You are going to break my heart,_ she muttered, sweeping out to her own room. 

Mycroft came home for the holiday looking gaunt and sick four hours into the most epic collapse of his life, after mummy had already left him alone to tend to her own wounds in piece, and Sherlock hated him immediately.

“You!” He said, and it was hard – painful – to get out around his hiccups, and gummy throat. “Are never here when I need you.”

Mycroft was immediately confused, and Papagena went to leap for him, but Mycroft was too fast for her and caught her around the middle, holding her against his chest. “Sherlock, look at me.”

Sherlock couldn’t breathe, let alone respond to his brother’s demands. His brother who was only ever good for the aftermath, and was always making himself smaller, as if being small was anything to want. Sherlock hated him tremendously.

“How is anyone –” he cried, desolately, heartbroken. “My d…” Each fragment dissolved into new hysterical sobs like seafoam on the coast, and eventually Mycroft bundled him up against his chest like he had when Sherlock was a child.

“I h-hate you,” he kept stuttering, each repetition taking a long time. Mycroft rubbed his back.

“I know, I know.”

For once, Papagena didn’t wiggle between the two of them, and it felt strange to be held by his brother instead of holding her. Mycroft beneath him was bony and insubstantial, and Sherlock hated him beyond reason.

Enola, for once, had made herself scarce, probably because Mycroft was the one person she seemed to have any respect for. She was probably under some of the destruction. He’d shredded some of his favorite books, smashed glass terrariums he’d been tending for years, screamed until he had to retch, spitting soot into his trash can until he set off fresh spasms.

“I think Enola really tried to hurt me,” Sherlock finally whispered, when it was dark, and he was so cramped. He was too old to be held, and Enola, somewhere under his bed, or his dumped rock collection, or amidst the tattered wings of his dried insects, now on the floor instead of behind their frame, was living proof that he wasn’t meant to be.

“I wish I could thrash her,” his brother told him, whispering into his hair. “I wish it wouldn’t affect you.” Mycroft made it sound like a grim secret, but Sherlock thought the same thing on a near daily schedule. His laugh turned into hiccups which turned into fresh sobs. Mycroft’s shirt was surely ruined.  

“Mummy is going to have me sectioned. I think she was waiting for you to get home.”

Mycroft’s hands stilled on his back, but he said nothing for a long moment. “Do you know what your settled form tells me?”

“That I’m the second-best monotreme in the family.”

“Wrong. Papagena and Enola both don’t have teeth. They have a toothless jaw and a long tongue. The two of us, we don’t rip into things with our teeth: we strategize, and we surprise. You’ve met her tongue spines yet?”

Sherlock looked down at his ankles, fresh and scabbed over wounds meshing together.

“The neocortex takes up half of an echidna’s brain, Sherlock. _Half._ Compared to one third in humans. That’s sensory perception, special reasoning–” Mycroft paused.

“I know what the neocortex is, Mycroft. I haven’t had a lobotomy this year.”

“Well, Sherlock. The point is, I look at you and I know that you’re resilient, and brilliant, and you see so much—” (Sherlock was briefly grateful that Mycroft had left off the topic of the electrosensors, which had been a sore point for two months now) “—but you need help, Sherlock. Surely you must see that by now.”

Sherlock scrambled away from his brother so fast he gave himself a friction burn. “ _What!_ ” he yelped.

Mycroft’s voice was low. “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

*

He spent Christmas day in a hospital, and the day after. Mycroft came to visit both days, and Sherlock hurled abuse at him for hours, _you’re never there when I need you,_ and _I hate you_ until they changed from the sensational to the truth, edged into _they thought you were perfect and they were never going to love me_ until his voice gave out.  Each day, Mycroft would ask him, “Are you finished?” and Sherlock, spent, would nod his head weakly. Mycroft leaned in, kissed him on his fevered forehead and said, “I’ll be back in the morning.”

By the third day in hospital he was drugged to the gills, barely able to move under the sedatives. That was certainly new: when he was lucid enough, Sherlock tried to remember to experiment later.

Enola was sedated from day one, in a little cage-restraint on the other end of his hospital room, because his mother had told his doctor that she hated him. He’d looked at the cage and thought: I need one of those.

Sherlock spent two weeks detained, at various levels of consciousness. Enola spoke to the doctor when he was sedated, and vice versa.

Mycroft came by, and Mummy came by, and on the fifteenth day, the doctor gave her a piece of paper and Roland made a terrifically powerful sound, powerful shoulders rolling as he sauntered towards the doctors fox daemon. Sherlock was almost impressed when she looked at him with the posture of a queen, or something else, something that thinks of royalty as gauche, and said, “We will be going home now.”

*

“You blubbering idiot. We’re only home because when they knocked you out, I didn’t lose it like some kind of hysterical freak-show.”

“You’re a sociopath,” Sherlock said, not wanting to cry again. He must be out of tears: his insides felt full of sand, and salt and broken glass, but no water.

“No Sherlock, _we’re_ a sociopath. High functioning, too.”

Sherlock went back to school with a prescription that made his head spin and left him melancholy and manic, but under the influence, Enola seemed to be more placid, and the silent truce was back in effect. It even held out when he burst into tears in the middle of a div, which he’d hoped but never expected.

Now that she had settled, she was too big and painful to be stuffed into his satchel like he always had in the past, and she trailed behind him like the second half of a depressing parade. The wounds on his ankles scabbed and healed over, a little.

But he couldn’t _think._ He spent all of his time in a mental fog.

_Dear Mycroft_ , he wrote when he was feeling particularly depressed, _I really need you to make whatever happens look like an accident, if I do not succeed. I need mummy not to know._

He shredded all of the letters he wrote to his stupid brother, who was never there when he needed him anyways, seriously, _fuck him,_ Sherlock would think with a savage malice, and not even trusting them to the bin, ate them, gnashing them to a pulp between his molars.

He spent half of his time _wishing_ for an accident, though, a real one, because he didn’t seem to have the requisite strength of character to step into one of his own devising, because he was weak, weak, stupid. Enola would have to do it – Enola would – Enola… Sherlock’s brain did a slow reboot as the big mystery of his child unspooled itself in front of his eyes.

He had to stop taking his pills. He had to see Mycroft. He had to know. His brain had always run on ten trains, but now his thoughts were a ride on the jubilee line with gummy wheels. He had to ask Papagena, because she wouldn’t be able to lie to him.

No, none of that was fast enough for the answer he wanted now. “Enola!” he said, and she poked her nose out of his coat. There were going to be so many pinpricks in it, but at the moment his coat might as well have been a sunset metaphor for all it mattered to him: “ _did Gwen kill my father?_ ”

Enola’s eyes had layered shadows, as she stared at him long enough to make him feel shaken. “You always were slow on the uptake.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be honest, I had a lot of ideas going in on this fic about how some *emotions* would play out, but not a lot of actual planning, and now that things have gotten a little out of control, I think I might revisit the past few chapters and age Sherlock up here, to fifteen or so, give him a later puberty, because I think 12/13 is too young for this kind of heartbreak. 
> 
> I actually really, really hate angst. Um. I'm not really sure how this happened.


	7. Mycroft

“He couldn’t have come to that conclusion if he had spoken to Sherlock for even one hour.”

Mycroft paced in front of their mother, sprawled out as she was in dramatic silence.

“How he could see Sherlock, who is smart and funny, and clearly _hates himself_ and come to the conclusion that he’s a _sociopath?_ The man should have his license to practice medicine revoked.” Mycroft’s voice rose steadily.

“Mycroft, dear, I hate to break your heart, but you are the only one that sees your bother that way.”

“Then,” Mycroft said, striding out with a purpose, speaking over his shoulder on his way out the door, “I should be the only one allowed to see him.”

*

Mycroft spends the entire holiday furious. Mycroft’s fury began roughly fifteen minutes after he arrived home to find evidence in Sherlock’s workroom of a mistake only a novice would make. Certainly not his detail-oriented brother, or his daemon who is fond of bragging that his sharp-eyed brother is a blank-faced simpleton compared to her.

He’s been angry with Enola before; he hardly even thinks of her as an extension of Sherlock’s person anymore, but he’s never before wanted so badly to _hit her._ There is something ugly inside of him, but he feels like it is usually sleeping. Holding Sherlock, he thinks, if she wasn’t some part of Sherlock’s soul – if he could make her quake without bruising something invisible in his little brother – he would put his hands around her neck.

He doesn’t know what he would do after that, and that scares him.

His mother has Sherlock sectioned, and Mycroft had to bite his tongue. “Sherlock,” he’d whispered, horrified that his only brother was too medicated to do more than flutter his eyelashes at him to acknowledge his presence.

Mycroft’s spine tenses like a stringed instrument getting tuned by an inept, heavy hand as each day passes and his brother is not returned to him on Christmas, or boxing day. He feels angry, and helpless, and angry at being helpless and with startling clarity, Mycroft decides he will never feel this way again, if he can help it.

When he goes back to school, for the first time, he sets his formidable brain to work on the complicated tangle of ethics and technical quandaries around _separation_.

*

Mycroft finds attraction elusive during his uni years. There are occasional fleeting fluctuations of hormones, and Mycroft finds that he enjoys a certain force of mind and brightness of spirit rather than a particular waist-hip ratio, gender, or haircut.

He has sex for the first time in a narrow single bed, after the typical progression of  interesting dates with an interesting fellow student. He is almost embarrassed by how common the whole experience is, and he is definitely embarrassed by how long it took to happen to him.

Afterwards, he feels strange and wrong footed, and when he tries to drift off to sleep, he jerks to alertness, over and over and over. His head buzzes like agitated insects, thoughts stuttering over every awkward moment and misstep all night. He wonders if this is why people take up smoking; to hide from the highlight reel of humiliation.

She settles heavy on his chest, nuzzling her face into his neck. “Shh,” she mumbles. “You’re so lovely. Please stay.” Her hand comes up to touch his face, and her skims her fingertips across his brow and down his nose with such a graceful touch he fancies he can feel the drag of her fingerprints.

Pinned, he feels a little of the agitation drain away. She is gorgeous and she is not afraid to take up space. It’s what he found interesting about her. She has a Bedlington terrier daemon and Mycroft is intrigued by the fact that it looks like a lamb with a full mouth of teeth.

Papagena is already out for the night, curled against its side. In the morning she kisses down his chest, stopping playfully near his navel to poke it with her nose, and for a few minutes life feels easy.

He cards his hands through her silky hair, and at some point he gets choked up, like something fragile, burying his face in the crook of his elbow to stifle the pathetic noise he makes. He stays around long enough to return the favor, because he has nothing if he doesn’t have manners, but he is so anxious and mixed up about – and throughout – the whole ordeal that he decides romantic entanglements are not for him.

He excuses himself with the most profound of apologies, and something dark and regretful settled in his chest like fog.

She shrugs and smiles at him, excusing his terrible behavior as if that’s all she’d wanted anyhow. Mycroft sees her hand shake before she stills it by wrapping it around her own shoulder. Self-soothing behavior, he categorizes.

He wishes her the best, and for a moment he feels the phantom drag of her fingerprints. Somewhere inside of Mycroft, there is the knowledge that he is going to lock this part of him away for a very, very long time, and he wishes he had a few more memories to lock away with this one.

He lingers too long, staring at her like a deer in the headlights, and lost in his own thoughts until she says “Can you leave, pl—ease,” quite pointedly. Her voice snags in the middle, and he leaves, already angry with himself. He feels like a deflated balloon.

Papagena lectures him for several hours, and he gives her a small mountain of baklava in a pitiful attempt to quiet her.

*

When Mycroft was a boy, he used to wish that the age gap between he and Sherlock was smaller, nonexistent. Mycroft had been a frumpy, awkward child, and it had taken him until around Sherlock’s birth to start figuring out how to interact with any success with most of the children he met.

He’d met Sherlock around then, and thought, fervently, that if he and his brother had been born around the same time, _surely_ he would understand. He’d spent countless hours imagining the adventure’s he’d have if his brother was seven years old instead of being a wailing infant, or ten, or twelve. If their daemons had played together as equals, tugged at each other’s ears and shifted out of each other’s grasp in a game of unstable wrestling.

Now, though, he wishes for the opposite: he wishes he were thirty, forty, fifty. He wishes he was old enough to move Sherlock into a house in the country while he figures this mess out. He needs time, and he’d been so, so stupid to think that he’d have a little while longer to get to the solution.

He’d worried since he was fourteen and he’d looked at an old picture of his father. It was a family portrait, actually, Mycroft himself as a toddler, chewing on Papagena’s tail, his mother on one side, with Roland keeping a watchful eye on Mycroft, and his father to the other, standing with aggressively rigid posture. Gwen was so far from the center of the photo she was almost out of frame, and her head angled in a way that had seemed familiar until the next time he looked at his brother and it had snapped into place: father and Sherlock had more in common than the cheekbones and hairline.

He’d wanted to ask his mother about it, but had swallowed it down instead, because it was his burden to carry.

His worry, though, had always been focused, perhaps shortsightedly, on a certain point. He’d been terrified of the point when Sherlock would be old enough to drive, and Enola in a shape that could sabotage him, as if having a daemon who would jam themselves under the break was genetic. He’d hoped, always, for something small, something harmless, something with no teeth and no hands. A ladybird, a soft-shelled turtle, a duck.

And now, Enola had settled, with claws and a thorny tongue and quills that she could poke into Sherlock’s jugular, and Mycroft wanted to weep with the unfairness of it all. He couldn’t, though, because someone had to be steady on their feet, and for some miserable reason there was only him.

He wrote letters to Sherlock, and letters to Enola, because he’d had some luck in the past bringing her to heel.

 _I don’t know why you’re so unhappy,_ he would write. He didn’t get any responses because she hadn’t settled into a form with opposable thumbs, possibly to spite his brother, and she’d never stoop so low as to let Sherlock privy to her thoughts. _Please be good. Papagena misses you. Remember the apiary, you were so enchanted. You’re charming when you’re kind._

The next time he’d seen the two of them, Sherlock looked too thin, hollow even compared to his usual rapidly stretching teenager’s body.

Sherlock’s suit was full of pinpricks from top to bottom, and his wrist was battered and discoloured where his cuff didn’t quite cover. Papagena leapt at Sherlock with delight at the train station, and Mycroft sent them to fetch him a coffee a few yards away, and Enola had given him the answer she must have been storing for him for months. “We are never kind,” she said to him, disdainful.

Mycroft leaned down on one knee next to her, so he could speak quietly, and with a cold, untouchable voice. “You have no idea what Sherlock is like, because you’re very sick. And when an organ is detrimental to the body, and eludes healing, persistently, sometimes the only thing to do is remove it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am fairly certain that the next chapter is going to bring us Victor Trevor and Sherlock's Uni years. :) 
> 
> ALSO: http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/bedlington_terrier/


	8. Sherlock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> friendly reminder that Sherlock and Victor might look a bit like this at this point: http://katiewont.tumblr.com/post/63345756818/give-your-heart-to-a-wild-thing-a-his-dark
> 
> Also, I kind of want to apologize for the chapter. After thinking and overthinking it for days on end, I'm not really sure how to fix it. So, we're moving on. Good day to you.

He’s seventeen when he starts his first year at uni in 1998. Sherlock’s whole childhood has been defined and overshadowed by his overbearing, overreaching brother and his inability to match up. Even his ability to ingratiate himself with people that they both know aren’t particularly interesting, reminds Sherlock of his own great lack.

Sherlock had decided, starting secondary school and looking at his brother’s A-levels, that he was going to do them earlier, have more of them. Sherlock lets his reaction to his brother define him one last time when he goes to Cambridge because Mycroft chose Oxford, but he applies to make sure Mycroft knows, that, too.

When he starts at Cambridge, Sherlock is required to have a roommate. The dean of student affairs tells him this personally, hands folded on his desk. The desk is something like a table, long and wide enough for his green tree python daemon to coil itself into a dignified pile without disturbing the stack of papers in front of him.

Enola is at once tense and resigned as she crouches between his legs. Sherlock, by that point, was a professional at not acknowledging her in any way. He leaned forward, and put on his best earnest face. “Sir, I really don’t think that living with someone else is a good idea.”

Mr. Hartford gestured at his files. “If you want to study here, Mr. Holmes, I don’t see any other options. I’ve reviewed your file…” Sherlock nearly pulled a muscle trying not to scowl. “And I don’t really see another option.”

He gestured at her with his free hand. “Your medical history is fraught with suspicious accidents and detainments in the psych ward. Your daemon is obviously a danger to you, and we want you to have a safe experience here.”

His face feels sunburn-hot, suddenly, his blood sloshing in his own ears. Enola cackles below him, and he wishes he could just stand up and leave. Instead, he makes due with subtly stepping on her little clawed foot when he turns back to his notes.

The only thing Sherlock can think to say is _She hasn’t killed me yet,_ but he isn’t sure how that one would turn out. “Sir,” he says, and has to clear his throat. He has a fantastic voice post-puberty; low and pleasantly adult. Over the phone, he has successfully pretended to be Mycroft countless times since he turned fifteen. It abandons him now like a stray when the food runs out. “I implore you to reconsider.”

“You’re seventeen, Mr. Holmes,” the dean says, kindly. “You’ve got an impressive future ahead of you. I suspect having a roommate will do you some good. If you feel the same way at the end of term, we will speak again.”

Sherlock moves to dismiss himself without any further ado. His hand on the door knob, the dean speaks again, like a parting gift. “I’ve met with your roommate, actually. He also requested private accommodations for a daemon anomaly of his own.”

Sherlock is suddenly very interested. “What sort of –?” He sounds too eager in his own ears.

For the first time, the dean smiles. “Wouldn’t you know, he asked me the same question. I told him he would have to ask.”

Sherlock hovers frozen at the door. He subvocalizes the dean’s last sentence with a furrowed brow until he says, still smiling, “Go.”

*

“You must be Sherlock.”

Inside his new housing, the man Sherlock assumes will be his roommate, is sitting among a small mountain of boxes, all piled on his bed. He doesn’t acknowledge him verbally, instead scanning for the relevant details. Three quarters of the boxes, he decides from the warp pattern on the sides, are full of books. He has a tin on his desk, already set out (mementos? baked goods?) and is wearing a suit that has obviously never been worn. He smells of the hydrophobic polymer film suits of a certain quality have when you purchase them.

“You moved in alone,” Sherlock says instead.

The man on the bed is possibly older than him, dark skinned and neck too long in a way that suggest new or unfinished growth. He nods. “Looks like you’re doing the same,” he acknowledges. “I’m Victor.”

Sherlock puts his best Mycroft forward when he says, “Charmed.”

So far, there has been no sign of his daemon, and Sherlock feels the bee-swarm thrum of excitement in his abdomen as he begins to suspect that he is going to meet someone who honestly doesn’t have one.

He is not in the habit of introducing Enola, but he does, just to see Victor’s reaction. That will tell him what he wants to know. “This is Enola.”

Victor inclines his head politely, but doesn’t give him anything further to work with. His expression is neutral. “Oi,” he says, directing his voice under his bed. “Come say hello, Ollie.”

Sherlock holds his breath as Victor’s daemon shuffles out from under the bed. As she emerges, tiny and ruffled, his face is a mix of affection and exasperation, with an undercurrent of embarrassment there.  

“Olwen, this is Sherlock and Enola.” And then, to Sherlock’s great delight, Victor added with emphasis, “Enola is the _daemon_ , so you should try and limit your communications to _her._ ”

Victor’s daemon, one of the small varieties of penguins, bobbed her little head. “Howdy,” she said, to him, without looking at Enola.

Victor clapped a face over his eyes. “Sorry,” he groaned. “This one is pretty convinced she’s a human.”

Sherlock swallowed a grin and admitted, nodding at Enola on the floor behind him, like a sullen child. “I’ve got that one, too.”

*

Victor, it turns out, wakes up early. Sherlock discovers this with bleary indignity his first week. He pads out of bed every morning at quarter to six, often disarming his clock-radio before it even goes off. Sherlock watches him from the stillness of his bed, eyelids positioned in such a way that he can feign sleep if he looks his way.

Olwen stays directly under him, fluttering her flightless wings and humming sweetly, off tempo and melody. Sherlock has been trying not to stare, but he’s unreasonably curious. _Daemon anomaly_ and requiring private accommodations means something more than one’s daemon being too chatty with strangers, Sherlock is sure, but Victor has yet to volunteer the information. Sherlock is determined to deduce it.

Except, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. She is cheerful and pecks at Victor’s head while he is trying to study and wants attention, and makes herself a nest under his bed for when she doesn’t. Victor, so far as he can tell, has scheduled his day down to the minute, and keeps overzealous lists on a whiteboard over his desk. He has obsessive tendencies in regards to the way he sorts his snacks, and his clothing, and keeps his side of the room meticulously organized, often cleaning up after Olwen, who leaves a little mess behind her regardless of the activity.

Enola, in the Uni setting, is about as antagonistic as she has been for the majority of his life. On the third morning Sherlock pretends to be sleeping while discretely trying to dissect his new roommate, tiptoeing around in cotton pyjama trousers with too much energy, starting a kettle with water from the sink on his desk-bound hot plate, Enola barks from the desk chair where she sleeps, “Will you stop staring at Victor, Sherlock? You’re giving us the creeps.”

Victor turns to look at her. “Good morning, Enola. I appreciate the heads up, but there isn’t actually anything wrong with being woken up by your terrible inhumanly early-daemon roommate, but not wanting to socialize at half-past.”

Victor winks at him and he pulls the covers over his head in shame.

In another minute, there is a scuffling at the end of his bed. “Sherlock,” he heard Olwen whisper, and then Victor’s low voice chiding her and scooping her up from where he'd felt her deposit herself near his feet. “Sorry.”

*

_Dear Myroft._

_Everything is tedious._

_SH_

*

All of Sherlock’s classes are tedious, and all of his professors are tedious, and Sherlock’s brain is going to melt out of his ears. The first time Victor walks in on Sherlock having a bit of a sulk on the floor, he can’t muster the energy to get up.

It’s not unusual, it’s just that Victor spends every minute doing some kind of activity or class or study group or tutoring session or therapy (Victor hasn’t told him that last one, but Sherlock reads the clues in the way he frets beforehand, and how he evades questions about where he’s headed) and he hasn’t seen Sherlock listless on the floor yet. While Sherlock spins himself into more and more misery, Enola watches from her chair. “Borning,” she yawns, as Victor crosses the threshold.

“Can I …” he asks, faltering. Victor is dark-skinned and his mouth seems perpetually wrapped around a punchline. He doesn’t have a joke, now. “Get you anything?”

Sherlock glares at him. “You cannot,” he says, stiffly, miserable and embarrassed.

“What about a juice? Or a glucose tablet? I have them in watermelon, actually, you might like one.”

Sherlock flicked his attention briefly to his roommate, hopping from foot to foot like his silly daemon. Olwen went to Victor’s bag to retrieve Victor’s bottle.

Sherlock made no move from the floor as he approached him. “You should eat one of these.”

“Not hungry,” he mumbled.

“Okay,” Victor said.

“Eat one anyways,” his daemon said, and pushed her beak against his fingers. Enola inhaled a jagged breath, quills raising.

“Sorry,” Victor said, nudging Olwen away with his foot.

Sherlock wonders how serious and melancholy one can look while popping a sweet into his mouth. Victor smiled and stepped over him towards his desk, back to his theorems and schedules, while Olwen sat on his chest with her funny, serious eyes.

After a few minutes, Sherlock got up to climb into his own bed, dislodging her.

About an hour later, he emerged to a quiet room, Victor hunched over a physics textbook, and Olwen nowhere to be seen.

He makes awkward eye contact as he goes to drag a book of his own from his desk. 

"Bees?" Victor asks. "What class is that for?"

"It isn't," Sherlock grudgingly admits. "I just, ah, really like them. I wrote my EPQ on them."

*

Enola keeps taunting him. “I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet. I wonder what it’s like in your simple little mind. Has your mind-palace been torn down so someone can build a two-bedroom flat?”

Mycroft writes him back.  _Papagena says soemthing will exceed your expectations. Finish a degree and we'll invent a profession for you._ He signs,  _MH._

Sherlock wants to ask him about his mystery, but he also wants to savor it. He writes back,  _No promises. Also, if she is being exceedingly sentamental, perhaps you should start feeding her. SH._

*

Victor Trevor seems relentlessly friendly. Victor Trevor says good morning to him at six AM, now that he knows that Sherlock wakes up when he does regardless. Victor Trevor responds kindly when Enola is rude to him. Victor Trevor is heavily emotionally invested in wordplay. Sherlock knows this because although he has never related a pun to him, sometimes when he and Olwen are devoting their attention to two different books, Olwen will repeat a pun she’s come across, and vice versa. He’s never seen something as someone telling their daemon jokes as pathetically simple as puns, but he nevertheless wouldn’t begrudge Victor his awkward huffing laughter.

Eventually, Victor Trevor is going to slip up, because there is something atypical about him, and Sherlock knows it.

“Come see a film with me,” Victor says. “I have three hours free tonight.”

“Busy,” Sherlock says, without looking at him. He’s horizontal across the floor, where he finds himself when gravity pulls too hard on him, tossing a ball up in the air from chest level.  

“Come on, Sherlock. What are you busy doing?”

Sherlock stares at the ceiling. “I have a paper to write.”

“We’ve lived together for weeks and we still don’t know anything about each other.”

Sherlock looks at Victor out of the side of his eyes. “I know that you own one suit and took six A levels. You are near compulsive with your neatness and possessions, are a near hoarder, and your daemon has no sense of propriety or boundaries. It also settled as a flightless bird that nevertheless has interesting adaptions to its environment. My theory is that you lived with your extended family, maybe in an unglamorous ratio of people to bedrooms, probably unglamorous all around. You’re nineteen, so odds are you stayed around to work for a year before going off out of some sense of duty or something similarly pedantic.”

Olwen dives into her under-bed lair, the messiest part of the entire room. Sherlock loses sight of her behind the clutter, despite the fact that he’s at the right level to see under the bed.

“Well, that’s not … particularly polite,” Victor frowns.

“Is that all you have to say?” Sherlock scoffs.

“I suppose. I’m a little at a loss.”

Victor doesn’t look angry, though. Sherlock peers at him, and the color of his skin protects him from Sherlock’s scrutiny so far as Sherlock can’t tell if he’s blushing, so he stares at the pulse point in his neck. It wobbles visibly.

Ah, well. At least that’s over now. Next term, if Enola doesn’t manage to push him into oncoming traffic or poison his food, he could very possibly get his way. Especially if he swallows his pride and asks Mycroft to help. Eventually, normal people realize that he is missing all of the pieces that most people deem essential to the human experience. Sherlock might as well not get attached to this one.

“Good. Perhaps from now on we can stay out of each other’s way.”

Victor chews on his lip and goes to arranging the books that line his desk.

“No, that’s not all we have to say,” a little voice comes from under his bed. It sounds different, the acoustics tinny, the voice wrong.

“Let’s hear it,” Sherlock allows. He’s always found talking to other people’s daemons interesting, but he doesn’t often have the chance.

“That wasn’t just _not polite._ That was _really rude_ and we’ve been nothing but kind even though your daemon is supremely unpleasant. And you don’t even know us.”

“Oh?” Sherlock sneered. His entire body was a raw nerve. “Tell me something that’ll surprise me.”

“I’ll do you one better,” she says, in a little voice, determined and angry, and Victor stands up, swiftly. He’s taller than Sherlock, and still growing; quite an intimidating shape from his vantage point on the floor.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he says, in one long, horrified litany, moving to block her in with his wide foot.

He’s too late. Even Enola is looking as a little shape comes buzzing out from under the bed, flying straight into Sherlock’s hair.

His hand goes up automatically, shocked and confused even as Victor says woefully: “I guess the cat’s out of the bag.”

And promptly cracks himself up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tumblr: katiewont.tumblr.com


	9. Mycroft

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay!

Mycroft’s father had always said true power was invisible. He was an adult before he came around to that sort of thinking: as an overweight child with a storm cloud of a traumatized brother, Mycroft had thought he must have been wrong. True power, it seemed, had a title and an imposing figure and broad shoulders and a lioness for a daemon.

Now, Mycroft Holmes is twenty four, and of all the brilliant young men around him, the ones advancing seem to know what his father told him so long ago.

Papagena, when she walks, usually lifts her front paws a few inches off the ground. She looks like a small Neanderthal. She is awkward. Indiscrete. She looks, to be honest, a little silly. Mycroft is undeniably fond of her, but she isn’t subtle, and she certainly isn't quietly poisonous.

The problem is, Mycroft loves her. This is a problem because he is going to separate from her, and it is going to cut him into a puzzle and wear away the edges. She will always be a part of him, but after separation, the tie between them will be a loose cord instead of elastic.

“There are a lot of places we can take a man with no daemon,” his supervisor says to him one day, his voice low. Under his desk, there is no scaled beast, or furred or fanged. There could be a pillbox for an arthropod on his person, but Mycroft can read in the man’s fingernails and worry lines and his trouser lines (not to mention his office) how unlikely that is. Here is a man with not much to lose, an estranged wife and a daughter who won’t speak to him, and most importantly - stunningly, baffelingly - no daemon.

“I know, sir,” Mycroft says, and it is a conscious effort to keep his chin level with the desk in front of him instead of bowing his head. Mycroft has spent years scraping the anxious child who wants approval from the spaces in his ribs. Mycroft is going places, Mycroft is going to hold state secrets and control elections, he and Papagena can taste it, and somewhere between now and then, he has to lose an important part of his support system and banish all of his weaker tendencies.

The two plans seem to pull in opposite directions, but he is Mycroft Holmes: if anyone can do this impossible thing, it is him.

Papagena doesn’t speak from under his chair as he says, “I’m working on it, sir.”

The worst part is, she’s so sad and rejected, listlessly pacing while he reads his books about the whole thing, and she never says, “Don’t do this, Mycroft.” It rips him to shreds when they actually fight. She whines and complains about all manner of things: being hungry and being lonely and the fact that he’s decided to lock romance away in some untouchable space inside one of his near-infinite internal filing cabinets, but rarely does she fight with him with any real conviction. If she decided to make this decision difficult, he might not be able to go through with it.

If this decision was just about him, she would, he’s sure of it. _Is a job worth being miserable our whole life?_ she’d ask. Mycroft can practically hear it in his head. It’s strange having to weigh his own pros and cons because his daemon is refusing to be the voice of dissent. Instead, she circles listlessly, arranging and rearranging her bedding and stealing glances at him when she thinks he is otherwise occupied.

He starts letting her eat what she likes, spending long evenings after work making masterpieces that he sets down with a flourish with cream sauces and honey glazes and puddings for after. It is a hollow thing, and neither of them enjoy it.  

“Write to Sherlock for me,” she says one night, after he’s finished reading an extremely long report. It appears to be a traffic breakdown of Dubai’s major pathways, but there’s something beneath the surface.

Mycroft rubs at his temples. “We aren’t going to tell him just yet,” he says.

“He’s going to know, soon. It’s for him, Mycroft.”

Mycroft let out a low sigh. “I had hoped to keep it a secret until after. Because he is going to be… unsettled.”

“We’ve never pulled punches before; don’t start now. He is going to _hate_ us,” Papagena said in a rough voice. “He’s going to know you did it for him and he is still going to hate us.”

“Me,” Mycroft corrects. “He’s going to hate me. He’s going to see you as the victim here.”

Papagena kicks at the carpet beneath her with her back legs, anxious.  She doesn’t say it, but Mycroft imagines her correction. He could almost see it floating above her head, in dainty calligraphy: _I am, aren’t I?_

He writes Sherlock for her.

“Tell him,” she says, pained. “Tell him this is the year that something is going to exceed his expectations.”

*

Mycroft puts on weight again.

He’s been in a revolving door of weight loss and gain since secondary school, in waves of swallowing his feelings and strict control. Sherlock’s first year at Cambridge, Mycroft had felt relieved. He’d been drowning in panic about his younger brother for years at that point, longer than half of his life, with their relationship in a strange ebb and flow flux of closeness. The fact that despite all of Sherlock’s trauma and accidents and nights Mycroft had sat up in bed, unable to sleep for fear of what could happen to him, somehow, Sherlock somehow survived all the way to uni astounds him.

He’s let go a little this year – for five months the five AM phone calls have been absent, nothing letting him know that it’s Sherlock, something’s wrong, there’s been an accident. He hasn’t felt so spiraled out of control that he’s needed to banish all non-produce items from the fridge, filling the bin with pastries and crisps and pasta, and on one notable, wretched occasion, the produce drawer as yell, to keep himself from gorging on pears and apricots.

The day he starts his separation training, he comes home sore and defeated. He holds Papagena on the way home, bundling her to his chest as his driver does his obviously level best to not ask him if he is alright.

He patently is not. He presses his fingertips down Papagena’s spine, and she shakes against his chest like something terrified.

*

His brother, at Cambridge, almost immediately becomes consumed with some sort of mystery that he doesn’t have all of the facts for. Taking into account what he does and does not include in his letters, Mycroft assumes that it has to do with his roommate situation.

Around the time for the winter holiday, Mycroft has done all of his shopping, except for Sherlock’s. He’s kept contact limited because in teaching his brother to deduce the world like he does, he has created a monster. There are few secrets from his calculating brain. Mycroft is pleased beyond measure with his brother’s ability, but they’ve been isolated from each other since Mycroft started really looking into separation. He wants to get Sherlock something special.

He has to do some digging when an old number comes up dead, but eventually he gets a hold of someone he’s locked away in a vault in his memory, neatly filed under, “attraction, various, 1989-95”.

*

Six years since he’s seen Gregory Lestrade and Mycroft is pleased to note that he’s the taller of the two, now.

“Mycroft Holmes!” Lestrade says, as soon as he’s crossed the threshold of his office, sounding delighted and surprised though Mycroft has phoned ahead.

“Hello, Inspector.”

Mycroft, out of a sense of respect for the inspector he hasn’t seen since he was on the cusp of adulthood, tries to clamp down on the flickering deductive thoughts before they read him the details of Lestrade’s last few years – promotions, family life – like syndication.

“Call me Greg,” he smiles, all greying hair and wide, wry smile, and _oops,_ Mycroft accidentally stumbles upon the warm firefly of his adolescent crush, barricaded as it was, and discovers that somehow in the interim, humiliatingly and despite years of neglect, it seems to be thriving.

*

With Sherlock out from their mother’s roof, Mycroft is both pleased and disheartened to noticed that she seems to have cast off some of the extra years around her eyes and mouth.

“Mycroft, darling,” she greets him at the door of the family home as he arrives home for Christmas, as he always has. “You look well.”

When his mother says _well_ she means _thick_ but Mycroft has had a trying week, and he will take what he can get. He bends at the neck to kiss her cheek. “You as well,” he says. He isn’t lying; her hair, lighter than Sherlock’s, not quite as auburn as his own, and hardly greying, is swept up into loose curls and tied at the nape of her neck. Roland’s fur looks thick and his ail twitches contentedly as Papagena goes to greet him. 

His mother sends her cook to fetch him a drink, and he can retreat into his thoughts as he makes surface-skimming small talk with her.

“And what do you think of this business of Sherlock going away?”

Mycroft’s train of thought abruptly derails. “Pardon?”

His mother frowns, leaning forward. “You’re not trying to tell your mother that you don’t know?”

“I don’t have to _try,_ mother, I haven’t heard from Sherlock in weeks.”

“Your brother,” she says, some fiendish light in her eyes, perhaps at the prospect of getting to deliver news of his brother to him instead of the other way around in a way she hasn’t been since Mycroft took over as the resident expert on Sherlock, “has decided, or been invited, to stay somewhere for the holiday.”

Mycroft was so startled, he nearly spilled his drink. “With whom?”

His mother’s eyes were complicated, amused and dubious and hopeful at once. “A friend,” she says. Her voice is lost somewhere between a question and an answer, and for once, Mycroft has no response. 


	10. Sherlock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A million apologies to anyone who gets this email twice!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: vicious internalized homophobia, brief mentions of racism, and vague brief mentions of abuse of mental health meds.

“Your daemon hasn’t settled,” Sherlock said, “your daemon hasn’t, your daemon, Olwen hasn’t settled, your daemon, your daemon is Olwen can still shift because Owlen – your daemon – hasn’t settled.”

Victor didn’t stopped laughing. “Did I short circuit your brain? It sounds like it.”

The only response Sherlock could think of is _your daemon hasn’t settled_ but he’d already pretty much exhausted that line of thinking _._ Olwen, still in the form of a bumblebee hovered near him. “Stop laughing,” she said to Victor, sounding tiny and annoyed in a way that only made him laugh harder.

“Sorry,” he said, wiping imaginary tears from his eyes. “You just look so shocked for someone whose daemon is, you know, kind of a bitch to him. You’re not exactly the most well adjusted bloke around.”

Sherlock was reeling with questions – what does that mean? Mycroft would know what that means – but Victor’s laughter faded out softly.

 Sherlock used a phrase that doesn’t jump naturally from his mouth: “I just don’t understand.”

“What’s there to understand?” Victor said, battering a hovering Olwen to and fro with playful hands.

Sherlock has always felt like he doesn’t belong, at war with his own soul in a way no one else seemed to be, his daemon like a sodden wool sweater. He had never met anyone else with a _daemon anomaly._ Sherlock wanted to run a battery of tests, he wanted to consult with Mycroft, he wanted to make Victor fill out a long Q&A.

Instead, Sherlock said, “I’m sorry,” and then, “would you still like to see a film?”

*

They do not, in fact, see a film.

“I’m going to need you not to do a repeat performance of that in public,” Victor told him as they sat down to eat.

“A repeat performance of?” Sherlock asked wryly.

Victor was less than amused. He plucked Olwen from the floor to set her in his lap. “I’d heard that’s a thing you do, I just hadn’t seen it yet.”

Sherlock flicked his eyes discretely to a man in their collective view. The cut of his trousers said a lot more about his academic trajectory than the average mind could see. “Shall I do a stranger?”

Victor almost spat out the juice in his mouth before swallowing very deliberately. “You mean, tell me if he’s poor and has a foot fetish? No thank you.”

Sherlock did a double take, looking for evidence of such a thing.

“No,” Victor groaned, “stop. It was a random guess.”

Sherlock turned his sharp gaze towards Victor and he put his hands over his face. “That I pulled out of _nowhere,_ ” he said, mumbled through his own protective palms.

Sherlock laughed for a long time, and by the time he was done, his shoulders had lost their tension. “I’m sorry I was a twat.”

Enola’s pointy head swiveled up at him so fast she probably gave herself whiplash, surprise evident in her little beady eyes. _Well._ He hoped she had a tiny full body cramp for being so surprised: Sherlock _had_ manners, it was just that other people so rarely deserved them. Enola, for her part, never did.

*

“Sebastian Wilkes says you outed him for two-timing in front of both girls in the mess hall,” Olwen said, hopping onto Sherlock’s shoe.

Sherlock winced, looking over at Victor to see if being allowed to chat with the man’s daemon was part and parcel of his friendship. He shrugged as if to say _not like I can stop her._ Sherlock had never been one for convention, anyhow. “How was I supposed to know that his bedding of both of them was a _secret?_ ” Sherlock said, and the little penguin let out a peal of laughter, shaking her head to briefly ruffle her feathers.

“We hate him a lot,” Olwen said.

Victor started to smirk, but suppressed it. “Not kind,” he chided her, gently.

“Not kind?” Olwen shot back in her squeaky chirp, hopping from webbed foot to webbed foot on Sherlock’s sixty pound shoes, “ _Not kind_ is not the worst possible thing you can be. There’s _uninteresting. Unintelligent. Ruled by instinct._ ”

Sherlock grinned. “She’s right, Trevor. All of those are a damn sight worse.”

“Also, you can be a _complete bloody twat._ As our friend Sebastian has demonstrated.”

“She’s two and oh. This dorm is officially a not kind zone.”

Enola paced, on edge, under the bed, and Sherlock was aware of her because that was the nature of things, but for the moment, ignoring her, he’d never felt more normal. Victor let out an embarrassed laugh, torn at being so amused while his daemon sold out his private thoughts to Sherlock as if that were a natural thing to do.

*

“He doesn’t want to bugger you.”

Sherlock nearly fell out of his chair. “What?” he yelped, horrified. “Why would you say that?”

“Because he doesn’t,” Enola said. She had been mostly unnoticed all afternoon, electing to let Sherlock study in peace while she shredded his old notes, which, for her benefit, he overacted how much he was bothered by. “Olwen isn’t settled. Mycroft always said that meant no sexual attraction. He’s not like you, you filthy—”

“I don’t want to –” Sherlock spluttered, face heating up. “I’m not _gay,_ Enola! You know I – we aren’t.”

Enola had never let go of a weakness once she’d spotted it, though. “Poor mummy,” she cooed. “Our poor mother, when she finds out you’re a pervert.”

“Mycroft and I are very similar,” Sherlock said, unsure even as he said it if he had made the right conversational move. No one in the world could make him feel so wrong-footed as his own daemon, nothing so interested in cutting him to the quick. “I’m a little at a loss as to how you can be so devoted to him and hate me.”

“Mycroft had the decency to lock all of those tendencies away before he let everyone down. You don’t have as much in common with him as you try to tell yourself.”

Sherlock was massively grateful that she’d waited until they were alone to unleash her thoughts, which had honestly taken him a bit by surprise, but it was a cold comfort against the sharp pain that flared in her wake down the trunk of his body, hot like a fever and churning like nausea.

“I don’t _have_ those tendencies,” he said, and Enola remained quiet in the most brutal of ways as he continued glaring at her. “If I did, they would certainly not be directed at… we’re just friends. I have a _friend!_ Isn’t that what you always wanted?”

He sounded so small, so desperate. He hated himself. He hated himself, and Enola hated him, which was effectively the same thing, and Sherlock felt the house of cards he’d been tentatively building in his head start to slip. He’d been stupid, inexcusably idiotic, to think she’d let him have a nice semester.

“I wanted you to make a _friend,_ not start panting over the first human to lower themselves to talk to you with your cock out like some kind of dog,” she sneered. “And you don’t do things in half measures, do you.”

Sherlock could feel it coming, was starting to get a read on the torrent of her abuse. He bowed his head into the invective. “Which is our poor mother going to be more upset with? The fact that you found yourself a boy to slobber over or the fact that you couldn’t have found yourself a white one?”

It had been a long time since Sherlock had felt anything besides apathy and a sort of numb, old grief under Enola’s razor tongue, but he was suddenly furious. He grabbed her with both hands, pain bursting behind his eyes as her quills punctured two dozen wounds into his palms, and stuffed her into his hamper. Unlike the one in his childhood bedroom, when Mycroft had done that for the first time, this one didn’t have a lid, so he tossed a stack of clothes from his drawer, a blanket from his bed, his toiletries, and then set his trunk across the top.

Of all of mummy’s faults, Sherlock didn’t think racism was among them. He didn’t say that to Enola, because either she knew that and just wanted to hurt him, or she knew better than him and Sherlock wasn’t keen to know.

By then, Sherlock felt drained to his bones, like he was thirteen and needed nothing in the world but his brother. In her little prison, Enola didn’t have enough room to gain momentum to thrash at the sides, and stayed contained. She had enough air, though, and for the next hour she alternated between tsking over _poor mummy_ and laughing.

Sherlock tried to immerse himself in his mind palace, but he kept crossing over the threshold of his wholly imaginary dwelling into his very real childhood bedroom, each of his treasured items shredded to ribbons underfoot, glass broken and gifts from Mycroft only ash. He couldn’t seem to stop it, and had to keep opening his eyes to ground him to his physical location instead. After an hour, he gave up and took three of the pills he’d squirreled away from when he’d been fifteen and still consenting to be medicated at his mother’s insistence. He had always hated it, even though it quieted her, it made him sleepy and slowed his thinking. Right now, he felt that might be perfect.

Enola quieted half an hour before he found himself asleep, and in the morning he woke up with a pillow that looked like a bloody massacre and a roommate who politely did not ask why his daemon was trapped in a clothes basket.

*

Victor Trevor had an unsettled daemon. Sherlock couldn’t stop thinking about it. The roommate mystery was delightfully concluded, and he had never met anyone with such a thing. He wasn’t sure how to store it in his mind palace, so he put a little shifting version of Olwen in the foyer for later filing, like a tidy queue of one, snapping between various forms, but always back to the penguin.

She stayed that was most of the time, Sherlock noticed, out of respect for Victor and the desire to stay under the radar. Except, now that Sherlock knew about her, she sometimes shifted in their room, into a bat or a goldfish in Victor’s kettle when it’d gone cold and she didn’t want to be bothered.

Sherlock still wanted to experiment, he wanted to ask Victor to fill out a questioner, he wanted to meet his parents and see his childhood bedroom to deduce him back to the start.

Of course, Sherlock kept all of those unsightly desires to himself, because for once in his life, he seemed to have a friend who wasn’t Mycroft.

Even he and Olwen seemed to get along; like Sherlock, she seemed to be able to completely disregard societal convention by being on a completely different frequency. Poor Victor was always chiding the both of them to be _polite_ or to _stop starting._ Olwen thought all of his deductions were interesting. Sherlock hadn’t been so excited since the childhood days where he’d scheduled his life around Mycroft coming home from school.

Enola always watched them through narrowed eyes and Sherlock looked meaningfully at the hamper in warning.

Sherlock was about to get one of his wishes, he realized with trepidation and glee in equal measure, as the winter holiday drew near and he deduced that Victor was going to invite him to spend part of it with him.

He wrote Mycroft a letter, but he was so amused, he decided to keep the secret, like a private joy, just for a little longer. His brother would understand. 


	11. Mycroft

Mycroft gave them him two days before he sought out to find Sherlock, in a little “Sherlock! What is the meaning of this?”

“Mycroft, you cannot just intrude on strangers looking for me!” Sherlock said, breathless, and Mycroft felt the tension around his ribcage dissolve. Sherlock’s cheeks were flushed pink with cold, his eyes bright as he stepped out of the house and closed the door behind him.                                                 

“You look… cheerful.” Sherlock had wiggled out the door as soon as the older woman had opened the door for Mycroft, squeezing his way through a narrow space to leave his daemon trapped inside.

“I think I am,” Sherlock said, and began fidgeting with a blue scarf around his neck, as if he was suddenly embarrassed about being caught in such a compromising position as enjoying his holiday. (Hand knitted with smallish needles, Mycroft estimated three to four millimeters, hours of knitting, medium quality acrylic yarn, so a labor of love rather than a boutique…)

“Well.” Mycroft said, coughing delicately as Papagena pranced at his feet in a show of unbridled happiness, little paws practically running in place. “Your mother is worried sick about where you are.”

“My brother is worried sick about where I am,” Sherlock corrected, and Mycroft caught a glimpse of the child still inside of him. “I’m sorry, Mycroft. I told mother I’d be home by the twenty-fourth.”

“You could have warned me instead of me having to pull intel for you.”

“You could have—” Sherlock started, but Mycroft pulled him into his arms before he finished.

“I worry about you, brother mine. I will never apologize for that.” He set Sherlock back on his feet and took a proper inventory of him. “You look remarkably unshredded.”

Sherlock’s face took a complicated turn.

“No?” Mycroft queried, and Papagena moved forward to nudge the leg of his trousers up.

“Stop, no. I made a deal,” he said haltingly, and with a faint sneer. “I’m sure you’ll find out about it eventually. On the twenty-third of December, in the year of our lord, 1998, to be precise.”

“Sherlock dear,” said the same older woman who’d opened the door for Mycroft before. When the door swung towards him, Enola came tumbling out, and went immediately to silently climb onto Papagena “Would your guest perhaps like to stay for supper?”

Mycroft could see Sherlock’s first instinct to say no flash across Sherlock’s face like a neon sign, before he visibly tamped it down. “Would you like to stay for dinner, Mycroft?”

“I really should be headed home,” Mycroft said, graciously bowing his head towards the two of them, the older woman’s hand hovering near Sherlock’s elbow and Sherlock not recoiling. “Thank you so much for the kind offer.”

“Sorry!” Sherlock said, “Mrs. Trevor, this is my elder brother, Mycroft. Mycroft, this is Mrs. Trevor.”

Mrs. Trevor squinted at him, (nearsighted, laugh lines) and her mouth curved into a smile. “I should have seen it. You two have the same eyes. And posture.”

Papagena let out a peal of laughter as Mycroft and his brother reacted as mirror images: Sherlock snapping out of his natural comportment into an aggressive slouch and Mycroft elongating his spine even further in vanity.

“Walk me to my car, Sherlock?”

In the boot of his car, he pulled out a padded box and handed it to Sherlock.

“What is this?” he asked, pulling off the lid. Enola clambored her way into Mycroft’s arms for a better look. As usual, she was on the same page; she immediately let out a long peal of laughter. “Mycroft thinks you don’t know how to have dinner manners, Sherlock.”

Sherlock turned a murderous glare on her, perched as she was on Mycroft’s upturned wrist. “You said,” he said, in a low voice, like he hoped it wouldn’t carry back to the doorway of the Trevor’s house.

“Mycroft doesn’t count,” she scoffed.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “I appreciate the gesture, but this is… too expensive. They’ll be embarrassed instead of grateful.”

Mycroft felt a surge of pride that the issue of financial discomfort would even occur to his younger brother. “That’s why,” he said with a sly grin, and reaching for something else from the space, “that one is for you and your friend. The other one is sure to be well-received.”

 _The other one,_ of course, had cost roughly half of the bottle he’d bought for his brother, but was still sure to be considered pricey for a dinner wine.

Mycroft touched Sherlock on his shoulder and they stood together in a companionable moment of silence before he cut his eyes back to the house. “Thank you. I’ll see you in a couple days.”

“Shall I send a car for you?”

Sherlock shook his hand and took Enola from the other arm quickly, being careful to scoop her up by her wiry, but unspined underbelly. “I’ll take the train,” he said.

*

Papagena paced the length of the back seat the whole way home.

*

“How was Sherlock?” his mother asked, almost as soon as he’d crossed the courtyard into the house.

“I had some business to attend to,” he hedged.

“You’ve been to see Sherlock,” his mother dissented. “You think about little else.”

Papagena wandered off, affecting boredom but more likely trying not to irk Mycroft with her inability to go along with his ambiguity. His mother’s eyes followed her out of the room with a knowing smirk, and he scowled. “If I _had_ gone to see my brother, I imagine he would look very well. Excited, even.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said, and looked back at the book in her lap, flipping distractedly from page to page.

“I wish you wouldn’t do this, mother.”

If Mycroft had been given any advanced notice, he might have delayed his trip home by a few days. His father’s death had soured something at the core of his family, left them looking bleakly at the phantom fourth corner instead of reformulating into a workable shape. His mother had isolated herself, her and Roland comforted by the ghost of his father and Sherlock and Mycroft on the other side of the long rectangle. Now, he didn’t know how to keep balance without the tension of a present Sherlock to flex against.

Even sitting calmly with his mother as she sat with her book, when he wasn’t expected to make small talk, he wracked his brain for something to say to her. He was getting to a point where his work was more _redacted_ than publishable, and often distasteful besides. Sherlock was now an adult, for all intents and purposes, and he no longer needed to co-parent with her – as far as Mycroft was concerned, he could take care of his constant fretting by himself.

After a few subdued hours where Mycroft held a book in his own hands but his eyes couldn’t seem to move in any linear fashion, he excused himself.

“Yes, dear,” his mother said, as Papagena extricated herself from her conversation with Roland. “More business, I’m sure.”

“London never sleeps,” he said, putting his feet into his shoes and reaching down to pick up his daemon. “I’ll be in late. Please don’t worry.”

*

He didn’t put Papagena down as he drove, aimlessly down the cobbled roads around the house he had grown up in. Isolated, he and Sherlock had both been. What if he’d turned out like Sherlock? Would there have even been a second child? When he’d put together the pieces of their family history, he’d realized how relieved his father had been, how much attention he’d always paid to Papagena. It wasn’t until he’d assumed that role in Sherlock’s life that he truly understood the gravity of what his father had felt.

Mycroft had felt waylaid, as Sherlock grew from a taciturn toddler to a demanding child, but now he’d made peace with it.

“It’s Christmas, Mycroft,” Papagena said from atop his thighs as he turned in endless aimless laps. The sky out in the country was a smattering of brilliant lights, like an ocean filled with bioluminescent marine life, stirred into activity. “Stop dwelling on the worst.”

“I’m not,” Mycroft said. “But it’s hard not to think about… the other thing.”

“I know. It’s making you morose. Mood congruent memory,” she pointed out.

“I love you,” Mycroft said, which was a silly thing to say, because Papagena wasn’t something external. He felt the need to say it anyways.

“I know,” she said, nuzzling her cold, scaly face between the buttons of his shirt to poke him a few times in a staccato beat in between his ribs with her nose. For several moments, his heart and his daemon seemed to be tapping against each other. It was a move Mycroft had come to associate with extreme comfort. “I worry about us sometimes. But if anyone could do it, I think it would be us.”

 Mycroft parked off the beaten path and killed the engine.

He sat on the bonnet of his car, alone but for his daemon, until his teeth began to knock painfully against each other and Papagena demanded to be taken home and fed.

*

Sherlock came home on the twenty-third, smiling and wind-chapped, and with a haughty Enola slinking behind him.

“Hello, Sherlock,” his mother said, in a calm voice.

“Hello mother,” Enola said, and Mycroft’s heart rate spiked. “Sherlock is on voice rest.”

His mother, who suddenly looked very, very uncomfortable, looked sharply at Mycroft as if to say _deal with this,_ but then belatedly at Sherlock. “Sherlock?”

Sherlock gave a nervous smile and then shrugged awkwardly with one shoulder.

“So,” Enola said, sounding sly and amused and a little bit chatty, “Papagena looks fat. Mycroft must be feeling guilty about something, or he wouldn’t be giving into her appetite so often.”

Sherlock flinched and ground his teeth audibly, flexing his hand at his side in apparent displeasure, but he said nothing. His moderate good mood upon arrival was already a thing of memory.   
  
“What a deal,” Mycroft murmured, and took Sherlock’s bag to cover the squeeze he gave his shoulder. “This, brother, is going to be quite a holiday.” 


	12. Sherlock Pt 1

 

“What are you going to do over the holiday?” Victor asked one day near the end of term. He was on his belly across his bed as Olwen worked beside him, balancing odd shaped river stones into something that resembled a nest. Victor kept them in a bag under his bed, put away with normal Victor-levels of neatness when she wasn’t using them.

“Oh, the usual,” Sherlock said, not looking up from his desk where he was trying to get the most of the fading afternoon light, eyes straining and chin rested on his knee. His handwriting had gone spastic and loopy as the night wore on and he was still working. “Head back to my mother’s, make nice with my brother, try not to get sectioned.”

“Is that a thing that happens often?”

“Enola is terrible with my mother,” he admitted. “For some reason, going home makes her act out.”

“Our mother,” Enola emphasized from where she was having a lazy snooze in front of the window, without opening her eyes, “is insufferable. She might as well have died when our father did, because she effectively handed us off to Mycroft.”

Sherlock’s heart thudded in his mouth as he waited, terrified she would mention the rest of it, the treatments and therapies and the shocks that even now sometimes gave her nightmares, but she didn’t. Sherlock reached over to briefly touch her front paw before letting her go. “Ah,” Sherlock objected feebly, still full of hot shame, “only some of that is true.”

Victor looked wrong-footed for a moment, but gained his balance quickly. “That sounds like a mess. Why don’t you… come with me?”

Interestingly enough, Sherlock had half-deduced that he might be extended some sort of invitation, but it surprised him nonetheless. Victor didn’t try to keep eye contact as Sherlock sat, mouth agape; he went back to colour coding his never-ending notes. It was one of his good qualities. Sherlock was increasingly frustrated to notice that he had several.

He tried to sound aloof as he said, “If you insist.”

“I do,” he said, mouth curling into a smile.

*

Exam week brought Victor such tension that he was scheduling his days to the minute. His wall chart had his time sliced into thin slivers and he was revising on a rotating schedule of twenty-two minutes per subject with 45 seconds between to press his fingers to his eyes and breathe deeply.

“Olwen can’t do all of your sleeping for you,” Sherlock pointed out.

“Easy for you to say.” Victor said, setting aside the notes he’d been looking out and easing a textbook from beneath his slumbering daemon. She made a little whirring sound on the exhale. “You’ve just been doing yoga all day. Some of us have to work for it.”

“I have not been doing yoga,” Sherlock said, infusing the word with maximum distaste. “I have been cataloging the contents of my mind palace study.”

“To be fair, while you’ve been, you know, away, your body has been sitting in lotus for three hours.” Victor said, before waving his hand to dismiss Sherlock’s rebuttal. “Anyways. I can sleep next week. My body is just transport, anways.”

“Transport,” Sherlock repeated.

“Ooh, we like that,” Enola said. “Like a meatsuit?”

“Meaning Sherlock is a meatsuit for his brain, not for you,” he said, grinning.

Enola climbed up the back of Sherlock’s chair. “Move, meatsuit,” she said, gleefully. “I’ll read you your notes.”

*

“What is Olwen doing?” Sherlock asked Victor on the train, when his daemon went still, tucking her wings against herself in a way that went a long way towards making a small bird look much smaller.

“Concentrating,” Victor said in a low voice, leaning in to talk to the side of Sherlock’s head. “She has a hard time keeping one form when there are so many people around.”

“You get nervous,” Sherlock accused, surprising himself as it came out of his mouth, and then brought his hand to his mouth as passengers around them turned to stare.

“It’s hard to focus with so many people around. My attention is split too many ways,” Victor acknowledged, ducking his head a bit and pretending to brush lint from his messenger bag on the seat next to him. He was embarrassed now; Sherlock could tell, but didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.

“You don’t know any of these people,” Sherlock said, matching his volume to Victor. “You could let her…” he made a vague hand gesture.

“No I could not,” Victor said, but there was a hint of a laugh under his ordinary manners voice, like the ground under a pile of fallen leaves.

Enola pounced unexpectedly, knocking Olwen askew and she fluttered her little teaspoon wings, blurred a bit around the edges, before steadying herself. Enola let out a little bleat of laughter.

“Rude,” Victor said, and plucked Olwen from her own seat into his own lap. “Here, Ollie.” Victor draped one palm over her eyes.

Sherlock chewed on his lip. What would Mycroft say? He had a way of saying, apologies, in a clipped voice: a one word sentence with no subject that relied on the passive voice and the other party to extrapolate that Mycroft might mean he, specifically, wanted to issue an apology. Sherlock didn’t want to be ambiguous. “I’m really sorry,” he said, dangling his fingers near Enola to distract her. She scratched at his hand with her claws and Sherlock tried not to wince. “I promise she’ll behave at yours.”

*

“You,” Sherlock said. He was wearing his gloves, thick leather and entirely too warm to be worn indoors, but Mycroft had sent them to him after he’d grown out of his old ones, and he’d found that made manhandling Enola almost bearable.

“What is it going to take to get you to behave this weekend?”

Enola, it seemed, already had a price in mind.

*

Victor Trevor blinked at him when he returned, Enola trotting behind him calmly. Sherlock supposed it probably surprised the other man that neither of them were huffing, in tears, or bloody. He took his seat next to Victor and Enola made herself comfortable in the seat under Victor.

“Everything cricket?” Victor asked, keeping his voice low.

“Yes, actually,” Sherlock said. There was a strange, frequent fluttering sensation, behind his navel. “We’ve come to see eye to eye.”

The rest of the train ride went by with quiet daemons: Enola silent by agreement and Olwen by necessity of her focus on keeping still. Sherlock and Victor had the least-interrupted chat they’d had so far in their fledgling friendship.

Victor, Sherlock was embarrassed to note, was strikingly handsome, finely muscled where Sherlock’s bodily geometry still clung to childhood scrawniness. After Enola had tried so hard to call him out and push him to shame, he’d become painfully aware of the duality of his regard towards Victor, both as the first friend he’d made that hadn’t also come from his mother’s womb and as someone who had a collarbone hollow and lip notch that seemed to collect pools of sunlight.

The whole thing was humiliating enough without the added shame of a daemon who was staunch in her resolution to see him unhappy.

“Are you going to be nice to my mum?” Victor asked him, about halfway through their trip, as if the thought had just occurred to him.

“You mean,” Sherlock clarified, suddenly massively interested in the woman, “am I going to deduce her? Is there anything particularly secret about her?”

“I don’t think so,” Victor said, fussing with the collar of his sleeve. He was wearing one of his nicer shirts, and a pair of cufflinks, cared for but worn on the edges one would hold to put them on. His father’s, Sherlock hazarded privately. “But if there is, Sherlock Holmes, I don’t want to know about it.”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “That’s… unthinkable. My brain reroutes too much energy to gaps. I can’t even think about anything else if there’s a conspicuous gap. How can you not?”

“Some of us are content to not know some things as long as we know a lot of things.”

Sherlock scoffed, because that sounded like a terrible way to live.

“Fine!” Victor relented, smiling crookedly. “If my mom is secretly my sister, I don’t want to know about it now. She can tell me on her deathbed when I’m as adjusted as I can reasonably expect to become.”

“Huh.” Sherlock mulled this over, perking up. “Is that something you suspect might be… plausible?”

Victor let his head fall into his hands. “I’ve made a grave mistake, haven’t I?”

*

At the train station, they dawdled half an hour while they waited for Victor’s mother. Sherlock had offered to call a cab from the station payphone, but Victor had kept him from it. “She’s coming, Sherlock,” he said, butting his shoulder against him after Sherlock began to jiggle his foot up and down on his knee after a perfectly reasonable ten minutes. Victor eased down next to Sherlock on the step. “In the meantime, pretend I’m her.”

Enola gave a little chuckle from his rucksack, and Sherlock pointedly ignored her. Sherlock swallowed down a smile. “Hello, Mrs. Trevor,” he said, extending one hand politely. “I notice nothing amiss in the details of your personal habits or evidence of recent sexual escapades.”

“Alright,” Victor said, dropping his hand abruptly. “I’m putting you back on the train. Your parents can have you.”

“Parent is not a plural noun.”

“Well. You’ve got a mom and a Mycroft. That sounds plural to me.”

“Mycroft is a bit of a twat,” Sherlock said.

“You’re such a git. You’re going to meet my family and feel a little more grateful for a brother that sends you care packages and just stalks you a bit.”

“Your prediction is unlikely.”

Victor raised an eyebrow. “Has your brother shaved off your eyebrows? Planted pornographic drawings in your trunk. Given all of your pants a little round viewing window?”

“There was also the time Algernon put me in the --”

Victor curled his hand around Olwen’s beak, gently. Enola’s pointed head came up at an angle. “That time Algernon did what?” she wanted to know.

“We’re only talking about the fun sibling torture stories,” he told her, frowning. “I’m going to send you and Sherlock back to his house and Enola and I are going to have a nice holiday.”

“Sorry!” she squeeked, from inside the circle of his palm. Victor let her go.

*

After about twenty minutes, Victor’s mother came to pick them up, and Sherlock felt the strange compulsion to impress her. Instead of mentioning the raising (CoE in a military family) or her health (alergies, dry eyes, an early surgery during a decade they were still using polyester thread for sutures) and instead said, “It’s nice to meet you,” like a sensible person, and Enola fidgeted at his feet while he grabbed Victor’s bags before he had the chance, stuffing them into the boot for him.

Enola and Olwen sat in the back with Sherlock on the ride into the country, and Sherlock set his hand down besides Enola’s face to give her something to keep her quiet, as he was in the habit of doing when it seemed essential that she behave for brief periods of time.

To his massive surprise, instead of gnawing it to pulp as she usually did with great joy, she rested the underside of her chin against his wrist and seemed to doze off.

The hair on the underside of her chin prickled, but Sherlock couldn’t keep himself from grinning stupidly, some wild thing flapping in his chest. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been a two months! I wanted to finish some stuff and then got tangled in some other projects. I decided to split this chapter up because it had been so long and I was starting to feel mad guilty about this fic. Maybe the fact that there is now art for this fic will make up for it! And... if it makes anyone feel any better, in Pt 2 of this chapter, Sherlock and Victor are going to get drunk on Mycroft's expensive wine. _Outdoors._ Art by the fantastic Giles. (Gilesdraws.tumblr.com)


	13. Sherlock Pt 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and Victor have a holiday.

Enola seemed lulled, calmed, softly joyful, even, at the thought that they would return near Christmas to Sherlock’s home and she’d be given free reign. She was quiet and even the way she moved seemed less sinuous and more youthful.

For Sherlock, it was infinitely strange to feel so suffused with peace and warmth at feeling no active animosity coming from her, but also the dread at what would happen next. He kept watching her out of the corner of his eyes, waiting for something dreadful, like keeping a leery focus on the murky ocean. The mix left him nervous.

Mrs. Trevor made small talk, the things adults ask, what do you study and what do you like and Sherlock thought of all the films Victor had made him watch for months, and tried to sound casual. He told her he was reading for Chemistry.

“Oh, lovely!” She said, smiling at him in her rear view mirror. “And after uni?”

Sherlock usually didn’t think past Uni. It seemed a miracle he’d survived secondary school. “I’m trying not to get ahead of myself,” he said, embarrassed.

Mrs. Trevor laughed. “Just like my Victor,” she said, with a fond push at his shoulder in the front seat. “Useless lump. Head full of maths but not a practical bone in his body.”

Olwen hopped between them on the center console, fluttering her little wings.

“Down, pipsqueak,” she said. “Anyways, Sherlock, I’m ever so pleased you’re coming to stay with us for the first part of the hol. Shame about your mother being abroad on business.”

Victor shifted in his seat suspiciously.

“Yes,” Sherlock parroted, “a real shame.”

“What is it she does again, Sherlock? Victor must have mentioned but I’ve been burning the candle at all ends to get ready for all the chicks to come to roost.”

Sherlock wasn’t great with other people, but he wasn’t stupid enough to mention trust funds or family money to a family like Victor’s. He didn’t want to lie, exactly. “Banking,” Sherlock said, hands going up almost unconsciously to fuss with his collar.

“Brilliant,” she said. “Lovely.” She reaches out an absent hand to her right, and took Victor’s. “Just glad to have everyone home, and extras.”

*

When they pulled up to the house in the country, Victor sprang from the car with a rush of energy, leaving his bag in the boot to grab Sherlock’s duffel. “Sorry,” he muttered in a low voice.

Sherlock bumped Victor’s shoulder with his own. “It’s not the worst thing you could have said.”

“I just meant to --” Victor said, but he was cut off.

“Come along boys!” she called, from the doorway.

“Just -- don’t freak out.” Victor said.

The Trevor family home was small, and rural. His mother had her three jobs written all over her, and everything about their house told a story of everyone working so hard to barely make ends meet, like two buckets trying to catch the leaks from a dozen holes. As soon as he crossed the threshold of the house, the low rumble of constant volume hit him, and behind that, through the screen door at the back of the house, the laughter of children and their daemons.

“Your family is...”

“Too big for its own good,” Victor grinned. “Didn’t you tell me that when we first met? That I was poor and there were way too many of us?”

Sherlock started to blush. “I’m quite certain I was more tactful than that.”

“Yeah, that sounds like you,” Victor responded, rolling his eyes. There was a small cousin that had found its grimy-handed way to Victor’s side and Victor picked him up to swing him onto his hip.

Victor looked so normal doing it. He’d never thought of Victor as a brother before. It rushed in with something warm, like Papagena’s paws against him: Victor was someone’s Mycroft.

“This is Sherlock,” he introduces, giving the tot a jostle.

“Lo,” the child said, one hand sneaking into his mouth.

“How do you do?” Sherlock said, and then: “does your Nana Trevor know about the frog you’re trying to keep in the bathtub?”

“Vic!” the little boy yelped. “How does he know that?”

Victor let out a deep laugh and Sherlock realized, feeling deeply horrified, that his remark had hit its mark, that he’d wanted Victor to be amused so badly. “He can see through you, mate,” he said, giving him a spin. “And he knows everything.”

Victor had leaned in conspiratorially after spinning in a circle, speaking into the child's hair. It struck Sherlock, suddenly as a snake bite -- Victor was someone’s Mycroft.  For some reason, this was a revelation to Sherlock.

He mulled it over during dinner. Victor Trevor was very different here. Not in a disingenuous way: Victor was in turns spring loaded to produce results, one after another like a marathon, and at others, anxious and useless in the burnt out aftermath, blinking tiredly but unable to switch gears to sleep after too long demanding high alert from his senses. Removed from the stress and isolation of the school, Victor was completely at ease, in his element. Finicky, yes, because that was Victor all over, under pressure and on holiday, but with a casual slope to his body, as if someone had taken an instrument tuned too tightly and reset it to it’s proper tension.

Sherlock found himself unable to look away. During dinner, Enola and Olwen sat close to Mrs. Trevor’s daemon, and even silenced, Enola managed to seem like she was enjoying herself. Children squabbled at a low thrum in the background while Victor’s uncle and his mother had a spirited discussion about the Labor Party MP with the Tory voting record. Mycroft would have had something to say, something polite but relevant, or mildly scandalous.

Sherlock wasn’t Mycroft, though, so he channeled him the best he could no behave non-offensively. “That’s the one...” he leaned in, touching Victor’s elbow with his fingertips to draw his attention.

Victor tilted his head at Sherlock, and waited.

Sherlock lowered his voice, “You know, he and his daemon have the same,” he pointed with his index fingers in different directions.

Mrs. Trevor erupted into laughter until she had to dab her eyes with her napkin. “That’s the one,” she gasped.

Sherlock didn’t know if she was laughing at him for not knowing or because of his (rude) observation, so he wasn’t sure if he should be pleased or embarrassed. Both feelings settled into his stomach, like a rope falling into a pile.

*

“They all love you,” Sherlock said.

Victor turned to him, forehead creased, but smiling faintly. “Yes,” he dragged out, “that is the nature of the family beast.”

“All of them,” Sherlock said, with heavy emphasis. Enola, agreement or not, was snickering at his feet. During dinner, there’d been a puppy-pile of daemons tangled by their feet.

“Family,” Victor repeated with the same level of emphasis, and his eyes went soft briefly before averting his eyes back down to his task. He’d dragged Sherlock along after dinner to feed the chickens, and Olwen had shifted herself into one of them. She was pecking happily with the chickens; Enola was happily pecking at their feathered tails.

“I’m going to turn the hose on you,” Victor warned.

Sherlock grinned at him. And then, in a moment of charity for his stupid, bitchy demon who’d been surprisingly well behaved through dinner, said “No he won’t.”

Enola, silent as she’d promised, stamped her little feet, but she stopped messing with real chickens and moved on to single out Olwen instead. “Atta girl,” Victor said, and Sherlock felt a flush crawl up the back of his neck.

*

Victor hand-pumped an air mattress on the floor of his own fastidious bedroom, that night.

At midnight, the whole family was still making jokes at an ungodly volume, all of the children sprawled where they’ve fallen. Sherlock had watched Victor roll one off his lap when he extricated himself with a kiss to his mother and great-aunts cheek and Sherlock had followed, relieved.

“They sure know how to party,” he mused, watching Victor from desk chair. From this angle, he could see the slopes of Victor’s face from above, which wasn’t the usual view because he was taller than Victor, but only just. Between the way he looked when he finally glanced up at Sherlock, his eyes liquid in the low light, and his forearms bared up to his elbows by his rolled sleeves, veins of his arms visible from the effort of pumping, he looked … devastating.

“Oh yeah,” he huffed. “They’ll be noisy until morning. You really missed out not going back to yours for some peace and quiet.”

“I’m sure I’m not missing anything.” Sherlock said, cool. And then, belatedly and kicking himself, “here, let me take a turn with that.”

Victor waved him off. “I’m Samson,” he said, and flexed one tidy bicep at him. Sherlock pried his eyes away after a second. “Anyway, you’re just lucky you’ll miss them on actual Christmas. It’ll be disgusting; boxing day is the unfriendlies holiday I know because they all wake up glued to the flooring, still drunk from Christmas.”

Sherlock had never particularly been around anyone who drank to get completely pissed. He had never had the sort of friends in seconday school that would invite him to those sorts of parties, and he always worried about what sort of trouble Enola would get them into if he snuck them into some sort of club. He could find a way to get drunk by himself if he wanted to, but he hadn’t seen the point yet.

Sherlock wisely did not say what he was thinking, which was that if there was a way for Sherlock to invite himself over without any gauche, he would do it.

“We’ve all got our familiy traditions.” Sherlock said instead, “Shared hangover on boxing day sounds as valid as the next.”

Victor snorted. “Do you?”

“Have family traditions?”

“Yeah. You’re so posh. I keep wondering what your holiday could possible be like.” Victor said, and Sherlock thought, Well, I spent last boxing day in hospital.

“Not as much alcohol,” Sherlock said, shrugging. “I fear we wouldn’t make a very festive trio of drunks.”

Victor had pumped the air matress close to capacity. He leaned over it to press with both palms to test the tension. “I think that’s probably good,” he said, and then, “Okay, so that’s what you don’t do. What do you do?”

“Not much in particular: it’s the most unfettered access I have to Mycroft I have besides the summer hols, so he usually finds a way to give us a day or two without my mum.”

“Sounds a little sad,” Victor pointed out, rising enough to sit on the air matress.

“What? We usually hve a good time. Last year we he brough me an animal who had died in a laboratory between expiriments and we performed an autopsy,” Sherlock said with a smile. “I know that doesn’t sound like--”

Enola spoke with a soft voice: “He means your mother, Sherlock.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said, dumbly. He didn’t even mind that Enola hadn’t kept her promise to be silent as the grave because for once in their life, she seemed to be following the spirit of the law.

Victor looked down with a shrug. “I know you guys have an unconventional family.”

“I do like her,” Sherlock said, and then corrected; “love her. We both do. It’s just hard to be together for an extended period.”

“I’m glad you’re here, then.”

Sherlock swallowed, unable to speak. Luckily, his daemon didn’t have the same problem. She gave Owlen a friendly bat. “We are, too.”

“Wait. You’re not trying to sleep on that, are you?” Sherlock said, “There’s no need for you to give up your bed.”

Victor quirked an eyebrow at him. “Are you kidding me? Enola’s not allowed on my best air mattress. It would be shredded in five minutes.”

So it came to happen that Sherlock laid in Victor’s bed, not particularly smelling of him after half a school year away, but Sherlock imagined it did anyway, and laid awake half the night, eyes closed and breathing even and tried his best not to get hard hearing Victor snuffle and shift and sigh a few feet away.

*

Two days pass without incident. Victor’s family is loud and boisterous and it is easy to slip by unnoticed. Victor often finds tasks for Sherlock to do that let him slip away for a few minutes of quiet, but on the whole, he enjoys himself.

After the first night, as Sherlock realized amid all the bustle that having a silent daemon makes him look unconscionably rude and that she’d made a gesture of good faith so far, they amend their gentleman’s agreement so she can go off and play with the other daemons without a gag order, so long as she minds her manners.

It seems to put her in a strange position, being amongst people predisposed to like Sherlock, because they love Victor in an overt, obvious way that they don’t even see in their own family. It makes her confused and softly wrong footed to be in a place to be liked without putting her at odds with Sherlock. She keeps throwing him baffling looks, like how did you manage this one?

Sherlock doesn’t know, but by the twenty first, when the doorbell rang and Mrs. Trevor said, “It’s for you, darling,” her hands brushing across his shoulders as she passed him on her way back to the formal dining room, Sherlock is feeling uncharacteristically light.

“Mycroft,” he says anyway, “you cannot just intrude on strangers looking for me!”

“You look … cheerful,” Mycroft points out, in lieu of responding. No one has ever told Sherlock he looks cheerful before, and he resisted the urge to touch his own face. He wasn’t smiling, which left him to wonder what about his face was like a signpost to his brother. Also, he realizes, he is happy to see Mycroft.

“I think I am,” Sherlock confided, fingers worrying the scarf Mrs. Trevor had knitted for him when he’d arrived. Sherlock was a little embarrassed by how lovely he found it, making silly subjective value judgements about it’s warmth and softness disproportionate to its objective quality. Mycroft knows everything, it will not slip past his notice.

They speak for another minute, embrace, and Mycroft graciously turned down the Trevor’s dinner invitation before he has time for his brain to make the pathway from the small-minded instinctive rejection that flared up in his chest to the more logical, and practiced politeness could take its place, but he leaves him with a good wine for the table that evening, and an excellent wine for Victor.

By the time Sherlock comes back into the house, he can hardly feel his fingers, but he doesn’t mind so much, Enola trotting quietly on his heels.

*

Sherlock is going to leave on the twenty third. He’d put the wine for the family on the dining room table right after Mycroft had dropped it by and the family had told him that it was very thoughtful and had been as kind as they’d been all week with him.

The other, he’d tucked away in his suitcase for the right moment. It seemed strange, and silly once he’d gone back in. He wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of my brother bought us a hideously expensive wine for the two of us, without putting him off.

His chance comes, as few things in his life have, rather smoothly.

The twenty second, the family has changed as people are making their rounds visiting other parts of the family and in-laws, and so the Trevor family living room is full of only his immediate family, six adults and two children young enough to keep each other occupied, and everyone is steadily beginning to drink, and Victor leans over and says, “Too much heat coming off those lushes. Do you want to go get some fresh air?”

Sherlock says yes too fast and they ducked over to Victor’s room where Victor pulled on his coat and buttoned it all the way up to his neck, soft grey against his dark skin, and Sherlock could see the tendon on his neck so clearly, and he must have looked for too long because Victor reached up to touch his face, as if to wipe something away.

“No,” Sherlock said, shaking his head to tear his eyes away. “Sorry, I was just thinking.”

“Oh,” Victor said, voice soft, and poking his long hands into his gloves. He’d worn the knobby wrists thin. “Sorry about all that. I don’t really...” he gestured at the doorway, the noise.

“Me either,” Sherlock said, and then admitted, “I haven’t ever, actually.”

“Moral objection?”

Sherlock looked down at Enola. “Not exactly.”

Victor leaned down, sitting himself right in front of Enola. The closeness of his scrutiny would be considered almost rude already, even before he opened his mouth to speak with her, but little about their relationship was conventional. Olwen herself was frequently chirping at him, climbing onto his prone form in the morning and taking delight on waking him up with her indignant squeaks, or rearranging herself into a bee to get his attention.

“If you and Sherlock have a drink,” he asked Enola in a low, respectful voice, and curled a finger under her chin, which set a low jolt through Sherlock, “would that make you angry, or will you be as lovely as you’ve been all week?”

The silence stretched on painfully, but Victor didn’t look away from her and Sherlock didn’t look away from the two of them until she said, “We could have a drink.”

And Sherlock, pressing his toes againstt the soles of his shoes rapidly to divert the twitching energy he was starting to feel in his limbs, smiled at her. “We’ve got just the thing.”

*

Victor put a tarp down on the snow, and then a blanket. Sherlock was bundled up in his own coat, and his new blue scarf wrapped more tightly than usual against the biting chill, his fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle, waiting for Victor to sit. He did with an ooph and Sherlock sat himself down.

Enola wasted no time climbing into his lap to scratch at his coat with her body. “Stop,” Sherlock scowled, “hold on just a second, there’s a blanket here for you two.”

They settled down with minimal grumbling, Olwen taking advantage of the privacy to slide out, sliding onto her stomach and stretching seamlessly into a snake form. Victor leaned over and rubbed his knuckles from one end of her to the other.

“Why do you stay put here? You must feel so full of static,” Enola mused, poking a flat paw against her tail.

Olwen shifted three times in rapid succession: a beetle, a doormouse and back into a snake. “Oh God yes,” she said, “my spine gets so stiff, but they’re still hoping, you know...”

Sherlock set his teeth. “Sorry,” he said belatedly, “should I...” he mimed holding her mouth shut.

“Like you could,” Victor snorted, reaching for the bottle with hands already clumsy with cold. “Here.”

Sherlock tilted his hold for Victor to grab it, gloved hands bumping into each other. Victor took his other hand, biting at his fingertips to pull it off and removed a metal bottle opener from his pockets and uncorking the wine. Victor squinted at the bottle. “Have we reached the level of poshness where I need to, you know, let it breathe or whatever?” He asked like a joke, but the tension in his frame belying his intention to sit it down if Sherlock’s answer is anything but a nah, give it here.

So Sherlock says, “Nah, give it here,” and pours Victor a glass worth his most prized possession, his dead father’s wristwatch, and then the same for himself.

Victor took a slow draw. “This is good,” he said, and leaned back on his elbows.

“Mycroft wanted to wish us a Merry Christmas,” Sherlock shrugged, but Victor wasn’t wrong, light and sweet and valuable as melted coin.

Victor searched his face, before looking down at the huddled mass of their collective daemons. “E,” he said, and the fact that someone else, someone Sherlock thought was charming and handsome and well muscled who didn’t find him as distasteful as his own daemon did, was on shortened-name terms with his daemon, and that flushed him with warmth. Then, on the heels of that, abject horror, because now the door was opened to anything she might say. “Did you guys not tell Mycroft that you two weren’t coming home?”

Enola seemed to be confused by the question, but finally she replied in the negative. “No. Not until he stopped by.”

Victor took a slow drag of his drink before he spoke again. “You… I just don’t get it. You love him,” and when Sherlock moved to open his mouth, Victor rushed to cut him off. “Of course you do, don’t be stupid, and you clearly have an us vs them dynamic with your mom. He takes care of you, yeah?”

Sherlock bowed his head. “Yeah,” he agreed, stomach churning.

“Then why leave him out of the loop? I thought maybe, I dunno, I’d bring you here and you’d be weird and standoffish and prickly because that’s how you are, even when you like someone, but instead, you keep smiling at my mum and letting my uncle Noah pull you aside because he only wants to talk about ballistics and you’re the only one that isn’t tired of hearing about it, now. And...” Victor trailed off shrugging. “Where’s the brotherly love, mate?”

Sherlock turned away, looking down the side of the hill, gorgeous and snowy and with the most stunning view of the stars hanging heavy against the navy sweep of the sky. “I do love my brother,” he finally said in a quiet voice. “But so does my mother. He wasn’t alone for the holiday.”

And then Sherlock put his mouth to his glass and drank, and then poured another. “I think I fucking hate her,” he said, and he was surprised to hear it. He didn’t know if it were true; Victor, beside him, visibly flinched. “You wouldn’t get it,” Sherlock said, waving at the house, behind them in the distance. “Your family seems … uncomplicated. They just love you. And each other. It’s baffling.”

“It shouldn’t be baffling,” Victor said, in a soft voice that made a small cloud. A small, cold cloud against his jaw. Sherlock blinked, suddenly thrown into panic by the proximity. “You should get it. Someone should have loved you, simply.”

Up close, Sherlock could see the shadow of stubble on Victor’s jaw, the softness across his cheekbone, caught himself looking at Victor’s mouth and jerked his eyes up to Victors, warm and constant and textured like tree bark, intricate and layered. “Oh,” he said, and Victor eased into his space.

“Do you mind,” Victor said, and Sherlock’s heart gave a painful squeeze.

He closed his eyes and willed his voice not to crack. “Please,” he said, and Victor moved in, close enough that Sherlock could feel the heat of him through his bottom lip.

Then, against his bottom lip.

*

Both of their faces were so cold and Sherlock didn’t know if Victor had done this before, but he certainly hadn’t, but he knew for a fact Victor had seen more than his share of terrible romance movies because he sometimes made Sherlock watch them too, so he took Victor’s cold face in his palms and moved his lips against Victor’s, trying not to be too strange or indecorous.

Their teeth clicked and Sherlock whispered _sorry_ into Victor’s mouth and Victor laughed and pulled him back in by his ears; he sucked on Sherlock’s lower lip and Sherlock’s pulse skyrocketed.

He’d been cold before, but with the adrenaline in his bloodstream and the fact that that he had somehow insinuated himself into the open space in front of Victor, practically climbing into his lap, he was suddenly warm enough.

He caught Olwen in his periphery, nervously shifting forms like she did when Victor got nervous: koala, bullfrog, dragonfly, snow fox. Sherlock gave a last lingering kiss and then pulled back slowly, leaving them joined at the forehead. “Hey,” he whispered. “I know you,” he said, meaning, I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want for yourself.

And Victor said, tucking his fingertips under Sherlock’s new favorite scarf and letting them thaw against the thumping bloodstream of Sherlock’s neck, “Oh. Well. That’s nice then,” and drew him back in. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry. 
> 
> I know I've left you guys hanging for six months. I've been guilty of ignoring this fic because, well, to be honest, there are about three people following it and I get so much more attention on other things and then it kind of fell away as my top priority, and then I started writing a lot of original silly erotica and I'm back in school and and and. But here's the deal. I love this fic. This fic is my first love, pretty much, and I'm not doing nanowrimo, so I'd like to wrap this fic up instead of writing an original story. 
> 
> I don't know that I'll follow the original plan of this fic, it might end in a pre John era, leaving open room for a sequel, although to level with you (SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS, this fic is endgame-Viclock, so a sequel wouldn't break that up, but instead add him to an existing dynamic.) I don't know when that would come, but I'd like to get this fic to a good place to pause. This journey has been a hard one, and anyone who has stuck it out with the Holmes brothers deserves to have a resolution, so I can't promise to bring them through BBC canon, but what I do promise is that I will finish this fic, and my hope is that you will be satisfied with where Sherlock is, where Victor is, what happens between the two of them, Mycroft and maybe Mama Holmes, Papagena, Enola... I hate cliffhangers and I have no desire to leave you at the end of this fic feeling like you sat through a lot of angst for me and I didn't come through for you. SO. That being said, thank you for


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